[HN Gopher] Girls perform better academically in almost all coun...
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Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 206 points
Date : 2021-03-09 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/E6NWK
| paxys wrote:
| This has historically been true in India, but mostly because only
| smarter, more upper-class girls (so those actually interested in
| education) were allowed to study beyond the primary school level.
| Boys need a college degree no matter the circumstance, and thus
| drag the average down.
| sriku wrote:
| From a personal perspective (Indian here), it feels odd that this
| would make news. I've been a fairly good "performer" at high
| school and have always had a hard time getting the better of my
| girl classmates. The acad stuff just seemed too easy for them.
| They'd remember and recall things so well and that would make me
| curse under my breath. Their language and general maturity was
| also much better that I could hope for at that point.
| cobraetor wrote:
| Hacker News has a progressive Silicon Valley bias, where
| Critical Race Theory provides a religious explanation
| ("systemic bias") for under-representation of women in tech.
|
| Data from other countries are considered "news" because they
| invalidate our neoracist beliefs.
| twgp123 wrote:
| Throwaway because this is one of the data points you are required
| to ignore in polite society.
|
| Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers.
| Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their
| behavior is better. The effect of biased grading is enormous and
| a huge disadvantage to our boys.
|
| > Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling
| behind girls in math during middle school. [1]
|
| [1] https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-
| documents...
| szhu wrote:
| Serious question, why is this a data point we are required to
| ignore? There's been a lot of discourse about bias lately, so I
| feel like this is a data point people will welcome hearing.
| Thanks for sharing it.
| jpxw wrote:
| If the poster works at a big tech company, there's a
| reasonable chance they could get fired for bringing up a
| point like that. That's the world we live in now.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| How to put this factually...
|
| Discourse about bias usually makes strong distinctions
| between groups that are known have relative positions of
| power in their society (because this discourse is mostly held
| in Western culture, that usually boils down to "white
| heterosexual christian-adjacent men") and
| minority/disenfranchised groups (women, religious minorities,
| ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc).
|
| Progressive groups are perceived to get _extremely_ testy
| when it 's suggested that minority groups might benefit from
| / majority groups might suffer from systemic effects in some
| ways.
| fullshark wrote:
| Because people interested in bias, are only interested when
| the bias is in other direction.
| throwaway02345 wrote:
| Because if you don't characterize women as an oppressed
| people in every possible instance then you're sexist. The
| truth is that women benefit a great deal from the general
| goodwill that society grants them. From legal sentencing, to
| taking your kids to the park, to mentorship opportunities, to
| simply crossing the road. The list goes on, but western
| society generally goes out of its way to accommodate the
| needs of women, particularly in areas such as the job market,
| where men pave the way with increased risk taking.
| audunw wrote:
| > Because if you don't characterize women as an oppressed
| people in every possible instance then you're sexist.
|
| Do people really say this? I've seen mens rights issues
| being raised carefully in the last few years, and I've
| never seen any backlash when done right. Like when you see
| articles written about women abusing men, or mens rights
| regarding children. Even women write about these issues.
| Feels like it's being accepted, just not being taken
| seriously enough yet. Maybe it's different in northern
| europe, but I haven't seen any backlash from
| international/US websites either.
|
| I think part of the problem is that men are afraid of
| defending these issues. In part because of projection about
| how others will react. Either if it's from womens right
| activists going against it, or other macho men saying men
| shouldn't care about child custody or equality for male in
| women-dominated workspaces and such.
|
| And there ARE also mens rights activist who are just using
| the issue to fight against womens rights, through
| whataboutisms and such. But don't let arguments against
| those people deter you from talking about reasonable mens
| rights issues.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I can see why you worry your commentary will be perceived
| as sexist.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| If you raise a point that shows a slice of society
| discriminates against men more than women you'll face
| criticisms that range from "what about the men" to being
| called an incel to being let known you are not welcome in a
| community. It is worse online than off but it happens in
| both. I've personally had it happen numerous times when
| bringing up statistics concerning gender bias in prison
| sentencing.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Doesn't that mean that 79% of the difference is _not_ due to
| bias? So boys would still be behind girls even if the bias
| didn't exist. Or am I misunderstanding this?
| twgp123 wrote:
| Tables 1-6 show you the actual results on the page labeled 40
| (PDF page 42) and the page prior shows actual numbers.
|
| In blinded effects, boys overperform in math and underperform
| in literacy. In non-blinded effects, boys underperform
| everywhere.
| andromeduck wrote:
| I wonder how this plays with the experiments that found
| that that girls tended to score much closer to boys on math
| tests when primed with the idea that they would do better
| and worse when primed with the idea that they would do
| worse.
| haihaibye wrote:
| This is called stereotype threat and there is clear
| publication bias in the literature. It's not replicating
| well in pre registered trials:
| https://replicationindex.com/tag/stereotype-threat-and-
| women...
| anotherman554 wrote:
| You are citing a study that isn't peer reviewed as a "data
| point" but when you summarize it like that looks like a factual
| claim when no factual conclusion should be drawn.
|
| It would be an interesting data point if there was any
| particularly reason to believe the document you cited would
| hold up to further study.
| del_operator wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder how skewed my perspective of high school
| was by finding a community college high school hybrid program
| that gave me freedom and access to better electives. It didn't
| hurt that community college tutoring was a huge bonus: provided
| hours of free tutoring per course and then rewarded with
| opportunities to get paid tutoring the subject if I did well.
| Meeting older community college students through tutoring was
| also very formative. Tutoring money as a 15/16 year old helped my
| independence and motivation.
|
| Meanwhile, I could have easily dropped out, parents even
| suggested I could given the strain of me getting me to school
| freshman year similar male peers did at 13/14, so just I lived
| with friends and couch surfed through all of HS. As a youngster
| though I did not show much academic connection and was suspended
| each week in a charter school, failing 2nd grade, but never going
| to 4th grade after switching schools. After a parent teacher
| conference where my mom embarrassingly tried to fight my teacher
| I realized things might go easier if I took time after school or
| during lunch to just wrap up my homework. Through middle school
| the boys and girls club created an atmosphere where I could
| continue that behavior and get access to computers and printers
| for written assignments. It was still a hassle though. Without a
| few key teachers in middle school I probably also wouldn't have
| kicked a bad habit of ditching school.
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Who could have guessed that having a majority of female teachers
| while constantly telling boys that they were born the wrong sex
| and should shut their mouths would have an impact?!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have never heard anyone say that to me.
| TedShiller wrote:
| That's not good for diversity.
| carolina_33 wrote:
| There are a lot of problems with this- this study doesn't include
| all womxn, only cis womxn. And what about latinx womxn? Or
| bipoc/mena womxn?
| carolina_33 wrote:
| Downvoted by transphobes.
| jpxw wrote:
| Given that the current trend is to blame any disparate outcome on
| discrimination, are we to believe that this is sexism?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and
| university_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 -
| March 2015 (70 comments)
| supergirl wrote:
| > HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to
| gender issues.
|
| underrated comment from the old thread
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I wonder if a reason behind it is the fact that girls become
| hormonally mature earlier than boys. Hormone supplementation on
| boys could be tested to assess the hypothesis.
| ihsw wrote:
| What's true one gender must be true for the other, as there is
| no biological difference between males and females. Right?
| thepete2 wrote:
| What's probably missing from the article is the giant caveat of
| almost all educational research, which is: *as measured by
| grades*
| agumonkey wrote:
| There was an article/study saying girl grades were shifted due
| to teacher appreciating their answers as better. I'm not sure
| how solid the study is (I still fail to understand how grades
| can shift for a whole group of pupill) but yeah grades can be
| fickle.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's in the title. That's what it means.
| after_care wrote:
| Grades aren't great at measuring real learning, but it's the
| best we have.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Not really. I'd argue that standardized tests are much
| better than grades. Particularly for any grade level below
| university.
|
| At university level, the grades are more accurate (but
| still flawed) because the grade is typically 70-80% test
| and quiz based.
|
| My experience in the US with grades for middle school and
| high school is that it's 85-90% non-examination based--
| Meaning it's essentially a measure for how well you can
| complete and turn in the busy work on time.
|
| That's a great measure for conscientiousness, but the
| standardized tests will show who actually learned the
| material.
| boringg wrote:
| Then you have a population training for the test and you
| end up with people that are overfit for the standardized
| test and underfit for reality.
| thepete2 wrote:
| Yes, this. Not to say that fitness for test and fitness
| for reality aren't correlated. They just aren't the same.
| All in all I just wonder if we don't overvalue
| competition (the reason I we probably have grades) and
| undervalue passion.
| thepete2 wrote:
| Except if people actually prepare for the standardized
| tests in some way or another as is usually the case ...
|
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
|
| Your point is still valid though, I find university test
| scores more "accurate" too, whatever that means for
| learning.
| Siira wrote:
| Preparing to solve questions in STEM subjects is what
| learning STEM is all about.
| audunw wrote:
| The problem is what those questions are. Are you expected
| to memorize a formula or are you expected to solve a real
| problem, possibly with the formulas available in a cheat
| sheet?
|
| My wife grew up with a lot of testing in asia. Now
| working as a teacher in northern europe she finds the
| approach here way better for actually learning, where
| there's less focus on memorizing things, and more on
| problem solving. The thing is, it's harder to make tests
| for problem solving, so tests tend to favor memorizing,
| especially when there's a lot of it. It's not just about
| making the questions, it's about grading them and making
| a judgement about whether the student took the right
| approach despite getting the wrong answer. How do you
| standardize that?
|
| I'm not sure what's standard, but at my university we
| often had exams with either formula books and/or a cheat
| sheet we could prepare ourselves. Yet the math tests were
| way more challenging for me than the simpler tests
| without access to material we had in high school.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Depends on the exam. If we're using something like the
| SAT or ACT, I can agree with that statement to an extent,
| but if it's a state exam, those are frequently flawed[1].
| I think it's the best we can do though, since while
| people frequently bemoan any exam as testing one's
| ability to take exams, I've never seen a better
| alternative proposed.
|
| [1]: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/art
| icle1952...
| [deleted]
| Alex3917 wrote:
| "A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an
| inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the
| extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of
| mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of
| material."
|
| In reality, boys may well be learning more than girls in
| school, maybe even substantially more.
| hntrader wrote:
| This could be a consequence of the variability hypothesis[1]
| interacting with the way grades are distributed.
|
| If grades tend to have a lot of negative skewness, that means
| that it pays to be in a group that has the least number of
| extreme underperformers, since your group's outperformers are
| handicapped due to the upper bound existing near the mean.
|
| That means we expect men to underperform in domains that have
| lots of negative skewness in the outcome distribution, assuming
| [1] holds.
|
| In domains where there's a lot of positive skewness in the
| outcomes distribution, we would expect the opposite result.
|
| As a first step, we would want to check how grades are actually
| distributed in the raw data, and whether there is an inter-
| country correlation between its grades' skewness and its male-to-
| female differences.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
| abhyudaya63 wrote:
| Variability hypothesis seems to downplay the cultural aspects a
| lot. Males were generally thought to have better visual sense
| of an object but the advantage was nullified when females were
| tested with objects that they are most familiar with.
|
| And you are right that we should check for inter-country data.
| It will provide a more accurate view.
| hntrader wrote:
| "better visual sense"
|
| This example pertains to mean skill level which doesn't seem
| relevant to the variability hypothesis (which pertains
| instead to variance of traits/skills/interests).
|
| If your point is that the empirical findings underpinning the
| variability hypothesis may have some cultural causes instead
| of being only genetic, then we don't disagree. But I wouldn't
| agree that the culture-over-genes perspective is
| undersubscribed, that's the most fashionable and socially
| acceptable perspective to take.
| tester756 wrote:
| some dead comment here wrote
|
| >That's right, the women are smarter.
|
| I think that's right, especially at young ages like before 20?
| 25? then this difference seems to be closing
|
| I always felt like girls were like 0-3 years ahead
|
| but I tend to believe that the gap tends to be closing over time
| m1117 wrote:
| Because guys spend their time playing videogames, drinking and
| watching sports.
| njdullea wrote:
| Yeah all those beer drinking 12 y.o. boys should know better
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Related:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
| f430 wrote:
| the mind has no gender so how can cognition be considered
| different across genders? hmmm
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Male and female brains while similar have some significant
| differences that goes beyond the androgen proportion
| differences. This has nothing to do with the gender identity
| as someone else pointed out.
| f430 wrote:
| I guess you believe the consciousness is local to one's
| brain.
| guerrilla wrote:
| The linked article is about sex differences, not gender
| differences.
| dudul wrote:
| Some studies seem to have found a bias towards girls when it
| comes to grading: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
| blank_fan_pill wrote:
| I recognize that my experience is probably not average - but at
| my high school (2004-2008 US public school) the advanced/AP
| classes were 80%-90% female. This was true for all subjects, the
| student government, and the academic after school activities.
|
| Also anecdotal - but I've seen a lot of the boys who were
| academically behind seem to get their shit together ~3-5 years
| after graduating and ended up going to college, grad school,
| getting white collar jobs, etc.
|
| It appears that if you have the resources and privilege its not
| too hard to overcome having dicked around in your primary
| education - but I'm willing to bet most people who aren't in that
| position never catch up.
| randyrand wrote:
| No surprise there, it's genetic..
| serjester wrote:
| This is just my experience but these days I read 50ish books year
| - back in school I would do everything possible to avoid assigned
| reading. None of them spoke to me, I wasn't particularly
| interested in figuring out a books underlying theme.
|
| Out of my friends, none of us enjoyed this. All my teachers were
| always women and I have to wonder if the curriculum was designed
| by someone more like us would we have gotten more from it? I
| honestly don't know.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| https://archive.vn/AIMT2
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Either you can ignore the data that suggests there are
| differences between girls and boys, or it might be worth
| considering some problem solving.
|
| E.g. at any point do we think about optimizing some learning
| environments for boys? When college graduation rates in the US
| are 70/30 girl/boy, is that okay? I know it feels weird asking
| the question since those ratios were flipped a few years ago, and
| we fixed it...
| [deleted]
| wisty wrote:
| Meta comment, a lot of comments here are not as measured,
| accurate, or carefully worded as the Damore "memo".
|
| Damore was sacked for his memo. Well, arguably he was sacked for
| people (at his workplace, using company resources and time)
| making disingenuous and vicious attacks on him (often
| misrepresented what he actually said), far less accurate or
| polite or measured than anything Damore said, creating enough of
| an internal activist movement that the boss had to cancel his
| trip to the Maldives IIRC.
| supergirl wrote:
| so many sexists on HN, it's surprising. whenever there is a
| thread about some differences in genders, it gets bombarded with
| "men are actually the ones being oppressed" comments.
|
| just look at this thread. 400 comments in 3 hours. it's because
| of the title. the idea that girls are doing better than boys
| triggered a whole mob. pretty worrying.
| nsainsbury wrote:
| Reading this reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favourite
| essays "On the Wildness of Children" by Carol Black -
| http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children
|
| It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in
| general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily
| engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy
| towards destructive activities.
| z77dj3kl wrote:
| I find it very curious that at high school level, it seems
| females outperform males in grades, and there is higher female
| participation/caring about the content (participation is rarely
| voluntary in high school); but as soon as you go to university
| level (STEM in particular), participation rates do a complete
| switch in that a lot of STEM fields have a huge over
| representation of males.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| What's the metric? Average GPA? Average graduation rate? It seems
| so.
|
| It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are
| in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in
| the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males.
|
| It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic
| things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of
| graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all about equal.
|
| After graduation, there's a couple other well documented
| attrition filters for women, unfortunately.
|
| There was this old essay about it, which is now quite old and
| probably cancelled, called "Is there anything good about men"
| that discussed various life tradeoffs that affected the genders
| differently.
| thepete2 wrote:
| As always we don't measure what matters, but what is
| measurable. There are actually very good arguments against
| giving grades at all, but it's sadly way out of the mainstream
| ...
| ipnon wrote:
| On a random individual basis men and women perform equally well
| at college. On the aggregate there are now 3 to 4 million more
| female than male college graduates in the US.[0] And now that
| more women than men are enrolled in college we might expect
| this trend to continue.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-
| attai...
|
| [1]
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_302.60.a...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see a time when people study why men
| fail at school, and are a minority of successful graduates.
|
| I find it fun to share that my boss is a woman, her boss is a
| woman, and _her_ boss is too. And they're all at or past mid
| career and highly successful managers at a world-class
| technology company. JPL is a wonderful place though.
| [deleted]
| dmayle wrote:
| > "IT'S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,"
| says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh
| English boarding school. "There's a mentality that it's not cool
| for them to perform, that it's not cool to be smart," suggests
| Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York.
|
| Which is it? Their brains/bodies/chemicals? Or the social
| pressure?
|
| Testosterone doesn't really kick in until high school, and the
| article (at least the part outside of the paywall) seems to
| suggest the problem exists in adolescents, not young children, so
| that would suggest that it's the former not the latter.
|
| The next question is... what has changed in the last 30 years?
| The answer to that is most likely going to be social, and not
| chemical, unless you mean less lead in the air. Maybe the answer
| is more complicated.
|
| Finally, what has changed in the last 30 years that might be
| linked to both? Well, easier access to pornography could be a
| factor. It's a social change that lines up with male adolescence
| that could be related.
|
| In any case, the 'answer' is to try to combat the change, and
| wait for statisticians and scientists to study the problem to
| understand the root causes.
| endisneigh wrote:
| How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in
| 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either
| women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing
| in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent
| then you'd think. I suppose all three could be true.
| TimPC wrote:
| No interest in money is an extreme position to take. Small
| differences in interest can lead to big differences in outcome.
| There is also some time lag with this data, studies have shown
| boys doing worse academically over time (relative to girls) so
| the age group in 2015 is largely in school, university, or just
| entering the workforce. Women in their 20's already outperform
| men in their 20's in earnings and we don't yet know if that
| trend is going to carry on into later years given new ability
| gaps. It hasn't carried on historically due to a wide variety
| of reasons including the adverse affects of maternity leave on
| careers but we haven't seen an academic gap of this magnitude
| between the genders either before so that may be changing. It's
| also worth noting that a lot of top earning careers are looking
| at a slice of top performers academically, and the distribution
| of academic performance for males tends to be higher variance
| so even with a lower average we may see similar numbers of top
| performers in both genders.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Either women have no interest in money_
|
| This is close, but too strong. You only need women to have
| _less_ interest in money than men to cause a difference.
|
| A likely cause of such a difference is that men with high
| income and prestigious careers are very popular as romantic
| partners for women.
|
| To spell it out, women in high paying jobs get a lot of money.
| Men in high paying jobs get a lot of money _and_ improved
| romantic success.
| qu4ku wrote:
| They choose not optimal collage majors is one of the answers:
| http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
| cphajduk wrote:
| I'd like to point out that the workplace values are different
| from academics values.
|
| The top performers in my college class, struggled to get
| internships within my internship-mandatory program.
| itronitron wrote:
| Performing well academically usually means that the student is
| good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the
| teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt
| for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they
| focus their attention on how to work around the system, which
| probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.
| visarga wrote:
| Like when you solve the arithmetic problem with algebra and
| the teacher says it's wrong because you didn't use the
| official method?
| tester756 wrote:
| on the test that's testing whether you're proficent with
| _official method_?
|
| or maybe because your _official method_ was "under some
| assumptions" or "by guessing that"
|
| I've heard that complain countless times from friends and I
| think always the reason was that it wasn't formally
| correct.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Why do you need to use a specific method to solve a
| problem?
|
| Especially with something broad like algebra, there are
| often many ways to solve a problem.
| tester756 wrote:
| Because teacher on previous lesson tried to teach the
| class e.g about using derivatives to find extremas, and
| now he's testing whether you managed to learn it.
|
| his job is mainly to teach you stuff.
|
| Of course there are also tests where you can use anything
| you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving
| school exams, end of semester exams and many more...
|
| It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
| paperwasp42 wrote:
| There's also the major factor of children. Women get a lot of
| scolding from society if they prioritize their career over
| children. Men generally aren't shamed to such a degree, and
| workaholic dads are even lauded as being "diligent bread
| winners."
|
| Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an
| option. They have to leave the office before day care closes.
| Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have
| to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around
| their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it
| extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack
| up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and
| single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically
| more likely to impact moms.)
|
| Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their
| significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more
| heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and
| income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high
| paying, high power careers.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| Tournament theory - top tier jobs (particularly executive ones)
| are a competition where rank-ordering contestants is relatively
| easy, but quantifying performance is hard. So one solution is
| to give the winner a big prize, the losers a smaller
| consolation prize, and if you ignore risk-aversion this is as
| economically efficient in terms of incentives as paying for
| piece-work.
|
| The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying
| levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the
| tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO
| does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple
| fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as
| tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of
| unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| A lot of literature seems to focus around the gap being mostly
| that girls
|
| - Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in
| school)
|
| - Are better at following instructions
|
| These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not
| really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no
| instructions to follow when you are building the next Google:
| nobody did it before you.
| frongpik wrote:
| Academic grades measure skills that are only applicable at
| entry level jobs that are about following simple known rules. I
| knew many female students in school and college that got top
| marks on every subject, and yet they were mediocre in real life
| and never achieved much 10 years after graduation. I think
| that's precisely because their patience to follow silly rules
| didn't help them to compete in the world where there are no
| rules. On the other hand, I also knew many guys from the same
| classes who absolutely sucked at every subject except one or
| two where they shined and they have made impressive careers.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I decided to underrepresent myself in the top tier of jobs
| because I do not want to live a life of a workaholic. You won't
| get into the top tier by doing 40 hours of work weekly.
|
| Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Psychology.
|
| Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction
| association) it was asked for the people in the room to send
| proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in
| charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a
| few things we could do but we have a problem because there is
| not a single lady in the list'.
|
| We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was
| as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic,
| no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining).
| My only idea so far is that women and men have different
| instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Another reason people don't often take into account is that men
| have an extra incentive for earning more money as their worth
| as a person is judged more upon what they make than it is for a
| woman (women have other things they are judged more upon). So
| each dollar, beyond the utility of having an extra dollar, also
| makes them 'more of a man' to use a phrase that tries to
| condense all of complexities of society's judgements down into
| 10 letters. Many of the explanations commonly given, like men
| being willing to take on more dangerous jobs, can be partly
| explained by their judgment as a person (and as a parent) being
| derived from what they make to a stronger extent than for a
| woman.
|
| >women have no interest in money
|
| Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and
| less interest, and also a difference between interest in money
| and interest in the status associated with a certain level of
| salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| Or, another question, why don't we, as a society, help boys
| perform as well as girls.
| dijit wrote:
| Men are over represented at the top _and_ at the bottom.
|
| So the average may be higher for girls, but that's across all
| girls.
|
| This is what the bell curves are and a result of men's being
| very wide and girls' being very narrow.
|
| This is known as the variability hypothesis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...
| drdec wrote:
| Now consider the fact that there is a limit on the top grade
| and much more more at the bottom of the grading scale. If you
| assume the variability hypothesis is true, it seems
| inevitable that the average for girls would be higher.
| neffy wrote:
| Lags in real time systems. To get into high paying jobs in most
| fields requires a 20-30 year apprenticeship.
|
| So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then
| the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so.
| Just as with universal education, it starts to be available
| from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that
| large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start
| making it into the skilled workforce.
|
| Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on
| eternity.
| 7_my_mind wrote:
| Women have different incentives. Having a career is not really
| necessary and the reasons to have one are different. Us men
| need to compete with each other to be the best providers. Women
| just need to pick one of us, and then their goal is to retain
| that man in their lives. Having a career does not factor much
| into that. Especially having a high stress career would maybe
| even hurt such goals. Some men and some women get so caught up
| spinning the hamster wheel, that they loose track of why they
| are spinning the wheel in the first place. But most of us in
| general are aware of the reasons.
| cperciva wrote:
| There are couple more explanations which haven't been
| mentioned:
|
| 1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic
| success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is
| filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a
| time when girls were underperforming academically. This
| hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among
| childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.
|
| 2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce
| correlates with academic success, one would expect it to
| correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge
| acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that
| girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater
| academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies
| comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on
| homework but only very slightly on exams.
| collias wrote:
| Source for the stats in #1?
| xyzelement wrote:
| Someone commented that it's about "babies" and that's so
| incredibly right. But I think it's more benign than it may
| sound.
|
| We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young
| child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in
| tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to
| cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with
| the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids
| do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her
| and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.
|
| I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two
| income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more
| family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants
| to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally
| inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.
|
| There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I
| think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the
| work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the
| pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about
| where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we
| have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of
| it can be read as systemic imbalance.
| Hermel wrote:
| Maybe the most talented women prefer pursuing a career
| academics over one in the real sector?
| [deleted]
| cullinap wrote:
| I don't if we can conclude that top academic performance
| directly results in high performers in top tier jobs
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Top tier jobs need to use top tier statistics. The top 10% of
| male test-takers and top 6% of female test-takers score at
| least 700 on the math SAT. Over twice as many boys as girls get
| 800 on the math SAT. The ratio gets even higher beyond that.
| This is despite the systemic bias in the school system against
| boys.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Isn't this the standard bimodal distribution we expect? Boys
| make up the majority of CEOs but they also make up the vast
| majority of criminals. Median girls are smarter than median
| boys, but the distribution is less wide on a population
| level.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| That's an interesting statistic. Do you have a source? I'd be
| interested in learning more
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| The first is from a table of percentiles published by the
| College Board, I remembered that statistic off-hand, I
| think you find it by googling, or on their website. The
| second is something you can find somewhere, I know I've
| seen the raw data at some point. Some googling will at
| least find articles referring to that ratio, like this one:
| https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598
|
| Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math
| contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number
| 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there
| I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a
| bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in
| my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or
| so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of
| good students with no particular involvement in
| mathematical extracurriculars.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I think Jordan Peterson is correct on that one: the real
| question isn't why women don't go after those kinds of jobs,
| but why anybody is willing to work so hard and to give up so
| much for incomes that allow a marginally better life (e.g going
| from 40k a year to 100k a year is a huge improvement, going
| from 200k to 300k?).
|
| Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the
| top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A
| man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women
| who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because
| of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I wish I had the option of being a stay at home dad. Fuck
| working
| refraincomment wrote:
| Or simply that boys don't take education seriously until 10
| years later?
| 0xy wrote:
| Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less, and
| under conditions that pay less (part time, contract work, etc).
|
| How many deep sea welders are women? Less than 0.1%. How many
| oil rig workers are women? Less than 1%.
|
| Good deep sea welders earn over $300k.
| krisdol wrote:
| Hard to live up to the expectation of being a good mother and
| spending months on an oil rig at the same time.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| You're being disingenuous and you know it. Most women don't
| take the high risk jobs. They never have, they're not
| evolved for it. This isn't sexist to point this out, this
| is just how things are.
|
| Why do people here struggle to understand concept of gender
| roles that have been in place (and have worked) for
| hundreds of thousands of years? This isn't the "patriarchy"
| boogeyman, this is how societies started and thrived.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I doubt it's "expectations of being a good mother".
| Countries with the most liberal attitudes toward gender
| have some of the most extreme occupational gender
| disparities and vice versa.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Define "naturally".
| 0xy wrote:
| Meaning on average, most women list towards them. There are
| large differences between genders in terms of career
| motivations, interests etc. Proven in many studies
| repeatedly.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _There are large differences between genders in terms
| of career motivations, interests etc._
|
| I think this would be the case for the hypothetical
| "party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if
| you're a woman" job, too. How do you know you're
| describing something about the people you're measuring,
| as opposed to the people around them?
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Only on HN will facts like these get downvoted. Why is this
| community so allergic to discussing this topic in an unbiased
| manner?
| La1n wrote:
| >Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less,
|
| Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get
| paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to
| those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women
| gravitate towards are paid less.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The fact that daycare workers (a job dominated 97% by
| females) earn $35k a year while carpenters, welders, and
| electricians (jobs dominated 98% by males) earn $80k is not
| a fact that I think is attributable to bigoted sexism.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I don't think those are what the parent was referring to as
| 'top tier'. Those pay well, but in both cases they are highly
| paid because of risk and life disruption (having to spend
| extended time away from home on rigs). It's my understanding
| that men are naturally less risk-averse, so the gender
| differences there seem natural to me.
|
| I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and
| high ranking corporate officers.
| [deleted]
| xenihn wrote:
| >academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
|
| This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills"
| means specifically in the US:
|
| - you perform well on standardized tests - you perform well on
| rubric-graded essays - you do all of your homework, and you get
| As on every assignment
|
| this leads to:
|
| - you get into a good university - you (presumably) perform
| adequately or well at said university
|
| Every student who performs well academically has a similar path
| to this point, but then there's divergency.
|
| Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree
| is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career.
| It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but
| it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and
| medicine.
|
| Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering
| positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not
| see a link between academic performance and engineering
| competency.
|
| I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo)
| for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation
| between academic performance and representation in the top tier
| of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier
| industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of
| the other big industries.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It's also possible that the distribution is different.
|
| i.e there are more men who are total geniuses at one end and
| total dumbasses at the other but the average would be the same.
|
| https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-w...
|
| No idea if it's true though - not my field and not an expert.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even if this were true it still wouldn't explain the
| difference. This could only be the explanation of two
| conditions are met:
|
| 1. Your cited article is correct.
|
| 2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top
| tier" level intelligence. This second point would require
| some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have
| representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs
| that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy
| persists.
|
| doctors: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-
| number-women-n....
|
| lawyers:
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-
| lawyers...
|
| (just to use two popular examples. if you extend this out to
| a lot more professions the pattern persists)
|
| You could be right, but I personally doubt it.
| curiousgal wrote:
| I think the answer lies in the fact that in countries like
| Tunisia for example, women represent over 60% of people working
| in STEM. Why? Because STEM jobs are the highest paying jobs. So
| from my perspective, the lack of women in STEM in the U.S. is
| not an issue but a symptom of a strong economy, as in you don't
| have to decipher someone's spaghetti code for a living, you can
| pay the bills doing other things that you are more passionate
| about.
| ku-man wrote:
| Indeed. The number of women in STEM fields is also low in
| Sweden and other Scandinavian countries compared to in-
| development ones. And, nobody in his/her right mind will
| accuse the Scandinavian countries of being patriarchal
| sexists societies.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Related reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-
| equality_paradox
| LeegleechN wrote:
| Girls get higher grades (perhaps due to higher
| conscientiousness), but do not do better in standardized tests.
| micdr0p wrote:
| That's interesting. Got a source?
| hc-taway wrote:
| My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools
| as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright
| boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so
| this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but
| practically all the smart girls did all their homework and
| maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while
| probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it
| and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that
| had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped
| much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two
| when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent
| marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters
| whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or
| active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c.
|
| So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure,
| wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-
| tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
| tester756 wrote:
| It seems to confirm my experience over whole education
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I don't know if this is a good faith question, but the big
| obvious reason you've omitted is that women frequently drop out
| of the work force (or shift to part-time work) because they
| want to be directly involved in raising their children.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Societal expectations that women do child rearing rather than
| men probably has some impact on that decision.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are other familial factors that are often at play. For
| example, many choose to delay their careers in lieu of raising
| children. Not all women make this decision, but a sizable
| number do.
|
| That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity,
| there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Depends on how you define top tier jobs.
|
| They are solidly in the majority of students in medicine, law,
| accounting, etc.
| micdr0p wrote:
| A suggestion from the article:
|
| > What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that
| teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of
| fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In
| some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad
| behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten
| primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary
| teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been
| shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is
| enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing
| girls the rod.
| carnagecity786 wrote:
| I guess it also has to do with the fact that this is a
| relatively recent change. Probably we'll see the effects of
| this in future generations of industry demographics, for now
| though the research and statistics are pretty clear in that
| women are underrepresented in STEM across the board; but this
| is something changing rapidly, especially in tech.
| marklubi wrote:
| Perhaps a fourth explanation... The vast majority of teachers
| are female, so maybe their teaching methods are favorable to
| girls
| endisneigh wrote:
| I suppose this is possible - how exactly do you think
| teaching methods are more favorable to girls compared to
| boys?
| danbolt wrote:
| This is just my gumption, but I don't think kids are blind
| to gender growing up. I'm curious if the attentiveness of
| boys would change if they had more frequent male teachers
| in earlier grades.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Teachers grade boys more harshly than girls:
|
| https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-
| documents...
| marklubi wrote:
| You stated three possible reasons, I added a fourth
| possibility. My statement was a fact about correlation, not
| causation.
|
| Perhaps you could provide us with some details about how
| education is not biased based on sex?
| esja wrote:
| A great deal of teaching is built around the idea of
| students sitting still in one place for a long period of
| time, listening intently and working quietly. Boys seem to
| have a lot more difficulty with this (on average) than
| girls do.
|
| That's one example but there are plenty of others.
| endisneigh wrote:
| yes I would agree that boys have trouble with this, as
| that's what the featured article effectively states.
| however, saying that the methods themselves somehow are
| predisposed to benefit women is one that I'd like to see
| research on.
| esja wrote:
| How can they not benefit women? The article is about the
| relative performance of men and women, and this factor
| reduces the performance of men.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You're stating that there exists teaching methods that
| somehow benefit women, and not men as a function of their
| gender. That's an extraordinary claim and requires
| evidence. You can't assert your claim is true and look at
| the article to justify the original claim that you're
| asserting to begin with.
| esja wrote:
| Sorry, what? I gave an example of a teaching method which
| creates difficulties for boys relative to girls. You
| agreed boys have trouble with it. What is left to
| discuss?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Boys having trouble with a teaching method does not mean
| said teaching method is _inherently_ discriminatory
| towards boys nor does it mean that its favorable towards
| girls. Do you not understand? I 'm sorry if I'm not being
| clear. Nothing you have said has illustrated things being
| somehow favorable to girls.
|
| One group of individual doing better at something does
| not mean the thing is favorable towards the group.
| esja wrote:
| The article is about girls outperforming _relative to
| boys_. In that context _anything_ which penalises boys
| benefits girls, by definition. This is basic logic. I 'm
| not sure what else can be said here, so let's leave it at
| that.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Your logic is incorrect, but yes, let's just leave it at
| that.
| hddu wrote:
| Top tier jobs are subjective. Women have less interest in
| engineering.
| cobraetor wrote:
| This shouldn't be a controversial take. It is Occam's razor
| after all.
|
| We know that before the tech industry became popular and a
| way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest
| in being associated with programming "nerds" which were
| predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the
| group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American
| phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social
| hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better
| academically outside of the US.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > women displayed little to no interest in being associated
| with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to
| the extent that men over-represented the group of socially
| outcast nerds
|
| When did this change? I either missed it or this was always
| an exaggeration in media.
| bluescrn wrote:
| I think attitudes changed a lot in the late 90s/early
| 00s.
|
| The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively
| growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was
| changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival
| of the Playstation.
|
| Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of
| youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing
| though, as by then we'd already got to the point where
| 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather
| than BASIC or LOGO
| disgrunt wrote:
| Or possibly, academia and the general workforce optimize for
| different things not included in your list?
|
| Does anyone here think their academic experience was a direct
| analog for their workforce experience?
| proc0 wrote:
| > women have no interest in money, academic skills have no
| bearing in getting high paying jobs
|
| Correct. I've yet to impress with my math skills, just saying.
| Rabei wrote:
| Women face a tradeoff in their relation to their careers and
| pregnancies that men do not.
|
| Even in the countries where child bearing is highly protected
| in the workplace i would suppose this can explain at a
| significant chunk of the gap.
| kashkhan wrote:
| or this is the cumulative effect of systematic discrimination
| for decades and centuries.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm not denying it's true, but I have little patience for
| this argument because we can't actually _do_ anything about
| it. Injustice today? Yes, we should absolutely stop that
| where ever we find it, but what am I supposed to do _today_
| about the fact that women could not vote in 1920? Words are
| cheap, actions matter. I 'd much rather focus on current
| discrimination than dig up injustices from the past.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is the right answer, certainly a larger factor than
| anything else being discussed here. In the US, women were
| only granted the right to vote a century ago, and a time when
| it was considered improper for well-to-do women to work is
| within the memory of many living Americans.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Or, people pursue their passions as young people without much
| regard for what a professional career would look like.
|
| I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen
| because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could
| eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy
| stories all the time, because that was her interest.
|
| 20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the
| choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is
| getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
| iagovar wrote:
| Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats
| about women on money issues.
|
| There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european
| countries, and if they are released from financial constrains
| (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down
| on it.
|
| Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do
| out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a
| similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially
| aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
|
| There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work
| interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.
|
| Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work,
| pardon my lightly written comment.
| aklemm wrote:
| Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it
| well--is not avoiding work.
| aklemm wrote:
| Some replies might be missing the point that it may well be
| reasonable to pay people raising children. OP implies it's
| a handout. I would argue it's an unpaid service to society
| and those of you relying on a crop of well-educated non-
| criminals to be your employees and peers are freeloading.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it
| well--is not avoiding work.
|
| It was pretty obvious from the context that the person
| you're replying to meant "working" as in "working a job for
| money".
| iagovar wrote:
| You're right, but you ain't making the big bucks. Even
| then, they seem to find it rewarding enough.
|
| If I was woman and I decided to have baby, I'd probably be
| either very stressed with my current job, or looking for
| something part time.
|
| Now imagine if I live in Sweden or the like where the state
| hands out money for raising children.
| jhasse wrote:
| wait, there are countries where the state does NOT hand
| out money for raising children?
| klyrs wrote:
| In Canada and the US, the state will take children away
| from parents in poverty rather than hand out money. But
| then it gets _really_ weird; they then place the children
| in foster homes, which get significant handouts.
| iagovar wrote:
| Yeah, probably most? IDK, I don't have the stats at hand,
| but in plenty of places you're alone agains't what it
| comes to you, no matter your gender.
|
| The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood
| changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on
| their own. For many people, children is their retirement
| plan.
|
| Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend
| than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example,
| is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid
| than countries more up north. Not only because the
| country job market is shit (which is important even if
| you don't work, because your partner has to bring money
| home), but because the state really doesn't do much about
| it.
|
| Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a
| functional state to look for.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| scarmig wrote:
| It's not avoiding work, but it is making a choice to pursue
| one type of work (child rearing) over another (market labor
| in shitty, unfulfilling, but well-paid jobs). That's a
| choice women have substantially more ability to make than
| men.
| filoleg wrote:
| I don't think that the parent comment meant that raising
| children isn't work. It absolutely is, and an extremely
| massive one too. What they most likely meant by "avoiding
| work" is "avoiding a paycheck job".
| renewiltord wrote:
| Having babies and raising them partly isn't avoiding work
| either. Babies get partly raised for all sorts of reasons.
| imtringued wrote:
| Before women were allowed to work the few women that did
| pursue higher education were basically expected to marry
| immediately after graduation. There was absolutely zero
| expectation that you would work a job relevant to your
| education because you were supposed to be a housewife who is
| busy with her kids. The biological aspect is probably the
| biggest driving force.
| Kluny wrote:
| > Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour
| of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and
| now economical venue to avoid it.
|
| Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that
| raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers
| and pension fund contributors is the most important work of
| all.
| novok wrote:
| When your "customers" or "boss" are people you love vs. a
| boss or corporation that is more prone to be an asshole
| than not, and the work of having kids has genetically
| encoded feel good chemicals while many find work a pure
| slog, it's not surprising if given the choice people would
| chose to be mothers vs. workers for a while.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure. You can replace "work" in his text with "work for
| hire" or something else if it helps you understand what he
| meant.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Critiquing the framing doesn't mean they didn't
| understand.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Understanding somewhat doesn't mean they can't understand
| better.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Sure, but the manner in which they critiqued the framing
| shows they didn't understand, potentially deliberately.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It's a common rhetorical device.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Deliberately changing the intent of someone's words may
| be a common rhetorical device but it's not engaging with
| the argument at hand.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| This isn't a formal debate. There isn't just 1 argument
| at hand. People bring up tangential points all the time.
| ameister14 wrote:
| It's not a formal debate, but I think it's rude to
| misinterpret someone in this way. It's not even a
| tangential point, because it's not actually connected -
| it's parallel.
|
| And sure, people do that all the time. People do all
| sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating
| effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming
| to any conclusion at all.
|
| I could start into semantics too, for example saying that
| people don't bring up tangential points because tangents
| aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea,
| because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's
| basically what I see happened here.
| 13415 wrote:
| That comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of
| what "framing" means. Framing pertains to different ways
| of expressing the same facts, for example _the glass is
| half empty_ vs. _the glas is half full_. Whether you
| consider work to require being hired and paid for it by
| an employer or understand it in a broader sense as
| including any activity that is important for society is
| not a matter of framing. These are fundamentally
| different concepts of _work_ that also have different
| extensions.
| nemo44x wrote:
| No one disagrees. We literally have a day to celebrate that
| and societies for millennia have cherished that. Many wars
| have been fought in essence so the mothers of their group
| would have better conditions to be a mother in as it gives
| their offspring the best chance to thrive.
|
| Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.
| sb52191 wrote:
| You're completely missing the point of the person's
| comment...
|
| The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and
| yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you
| replied to responds that they think it's because of having
| child and choosing not to go back to work.
|
| At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not
| raising a child is as important as working a job...
| Kluny wrote:
| I think YOU'RE missing the point. Childcare is still
| considered a less important and honorable occupation than
| pretty much everything else you can do. If you're "just"
| a parent, you're not considered qualified for really
| anything else.
|
| That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose
| status. Meanwhile women will always place lower
| importance on status than on childcare, and so they will
| do childcare because no one is available to do it for
| them.
|
| The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as
| valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and
| raise children, as for a woman.
| jtmarl1n wrote:
| You're making a straw man argument about the importance
| of work that wasn't in the original commenter's post at
| all. Seems like you are bringing bias or an agenda into
| your comment.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Baby raising is quite important work.
|
| Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force
| to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it
| was more socially acceptable for them?
| ganzuul wrote:
| ..Just have to say that these are terrible reasons to have
| children.
|
| You produce a small version of yourself and you are
| emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean
| something in the end. If you get to raise the child
| yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as
| well.
|
| Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than
| producing... laborers.
| swebs wrote:
| Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to
| do, even if they have no financial incentive. Most people
| don't like having to go to the office 8 hours a day, and
| very few probably would if money wasn't in the equation.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want
| to do,
|
| I don't know that is true of most men. Have children?
| Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men
| wanting to have more children is inversely proportional
| to the amount of work the mother expects them to
| contribute.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you took a bunch of women that weren't expected to be
| the primary caregiver, and gave them the same variety of
| expected hours per day spent on children, I would expect
| to see a similar correlation.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Men and women contribute to child rearing in different
| ways.
|
| Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is
| disproportionately more important during a child's
| earlier formative years. They also tend to have a
| stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the
| other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the
| public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women
| are at the center of the action, as it were, when it
| comes to the amount of time they spend with children,
| while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care
| of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the
| home. The home is also associated with greater safety and
| comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also
| see this reflected in occupational preferences), while
| the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort,
| something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is
| sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational
| preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous
| and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for
| more pay).
|
| I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not
| two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good
| way to frame things, though to a point. So men also
| participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is
| concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the
| need for paternal authority which serves the child later
| in other ways like the ability to relate to authority
| elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the
| public sphere and often also work. Conditions and
| circumstances can also constrain how male and female
| roles are expressed.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Frankly, I would make the stronger point: it's more
| important than your job (raising children can be difficult,
| to be sure, but it's not quite "work" in the sense that
| work by and large tends to be servile while raising
| children is a higher end for which work is done). The
| reason people work is overwhelmingly so that they can
| support their children and their families.
| rjbwork wrote:
| I think you're being deliberately obtuse and uncharitable
| to the argument being presented. Any reasonable and
| charitable reading clearly interprets it as talking about
| "job for pay" rather than saying "childcare is not work".
| farias0 wrote:
| I'm sorry but why are you so sure they're trying to avoid
| work? From my experience most women would love to have
| careers and be financially independent and successful. But
| babies indeed make it a lot harder -- both from a time/energy
| perspective and from a discrimination perspective.
| iagovar wrote:
| I'm too lazy to look for literature (sorry), but I remember
| studying it, and later read some paper about it.
|
| Anyway, whatever is the reason, they do take the tradeoff.
| [deleted]
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most
| stats about women on money issues. There has been
| policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and
| if they are released from financial constrains (handouts,
| public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
|
| Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?
|
| You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the
| career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to
| reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human
| species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to
| have kids _and_ a career? It 's about as universal a value as
| we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any
| guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal
| daycare / preK?
|
| I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do
| think it would be better for society if there was more
| support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.
| chlodwig wrote:
| _Why don 't we have universal daycare / preK?_
|
| How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all
| parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe
| for some parents that would be enough that one parent could
| quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of
| their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should
| subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of
| caring for the very young.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I'm mostly with you on this, but there's a larger percentage
| of guys than you think. If you worked in corporate America
| long enough, especially in tech, you've encountered lots of
| guys that clearly enjoy being at work more than home.
|
| People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines
| as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd
| do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like
| I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.
|
| I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a
| forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What
| if it really is better to have less money, and not have to
| deal with any of this work stuff?
| tshaddox wrote:
| In the United States in the last 30 years, the percentage of
| women working in computing fields has decreased
| significantly. In that same time period, births per women has
| decreased and the age of first-time mothers has increased.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Many of the above are true. Especially, academic skill is one
| of the most overrated abilities out there. You're better off
| with zero skill or being actively harmful, if you know how to
| play the game and have the right face (I don't mean literally,
| though sometimes that too. Do you say the right things and have
| the correct manners?)
|
| I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a
| homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining
| their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay"
| for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to
| do is be devastating for my social status.
|
| It's actually interesting to talk about because technically
| these things are true for women too, but we have a whole
| industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more
| important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really
| care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a
| full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I
| don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be
| judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left
| without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say
| in anything.
|
| We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood
| for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring
| fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-
| gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that
| result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood)
| that are harmful to their career, because their career is all
| they have.
| kache_ wrote:
| Most of my money is attributable to my negotiation skills and
| assertiveness, rather than my programming skill that I bent
| over backwards to develop.
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| I would agree with this. However Ive seen very assertive
| women take advantage of that as much as men or even more, and
| where I work its probably <10% of my co workers of either sex
| take active roles in "managing" their career as opposed to
| just showing up and hoping their work gets noticed, or just
| coasting and enjoying the paycheck they have (while still
| grumbling about fading benefits, of course)
| chlodwig wrote:
| _How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in
| 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs?_
|
| I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).
|
| Here is my model:
|
| 1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women
| have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the
| highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.
|
| 2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work
| because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do
| some bit of work only because they see some advantage to
| themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they
| see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning
| programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude,
| who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to
| try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might
| tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.
|
| When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that
| has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start
| trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl
| does more homework than the median boy.
|
| The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork.
| But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career
| path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of
| higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that
| get the top positions.
|
| On top of that, in my experience, women do make different
| choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths
| that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and
| areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved
| toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home
| -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-
| actualization", while more men still have the expectation that
| they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are
| gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed,
| obviously, many exceptions exist).
|
| And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would
| much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track"
| job than take a high-powered career path.
| burlesona wrote:
| I don't know how true this is, but one thing I've seen
| referenced a few times is that students perform better under
| teachers of their gender, especially at younger ages. It
| wouldn't be hard to imagine the same applies for employee
| performance in the workplace.
|
| If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly
| female, then you would expect females to do better in school.
| Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would
| expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.
|
| Again I don't have a study handy so I'm not sure how empirical
| that is, it may just be conjecture.
| B-Con wrote:
| I'd like to see data on academic performance in specialties.
| Most well-paying first world countries employ specialists (eg,
| doctors, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc). Recall
| Simpson's paradox in statistics, where a general distribution
| doesn't have to apply to the individual sub-sets.
|
| FTA:
|
| > Women who go to university are more likely than their male
| peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and
| women tend to study different subjects, with many women
| choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities,
| whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact
| sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life
| sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved
| ahead.
|
| This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.
|
| > academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
|
| I highly doubt that there is _no_ correlation, but I doubt that
| education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a
| slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws
| from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter
| slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the
| other direction.
| barbacoa wrote:
| I don't understand why people ignore the role children play in
| the life ambitions of women.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| In part, because salary has to do with agreeableness and many
| cultures have stupid expectations for women such as them
| expected to be more agreeable.
|
| Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people
| perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have
| stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical
| parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry
| and leadership positions). It seems like some highly
| quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-
| dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort
| of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of
| contributing factors are.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You also can't have mathematical equality with some fields
| dominated by women, like nursing.
|
| If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of
| a lot more women.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Unless you just have a lot of incarcerated and jobless men.
| esja wrote:
| This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman
| persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten
| teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is
| just never going to happen across all industries.
| rajin444 wrote:
| How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all
| levels?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| They didn't say it is.
| rajin444 wrote:
| > It seems like some highly quantitative fields which
| have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may
| very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination
|
| Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up
| statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics)
| may not be at this level".
| pseudalopex wrote:
| About 20% of people in CS are women. Ordinary male
| variability, difference in median aptitude, and employer
| selectivity could explain some of the disparity. But 20%
| is extraordinary. And people rationalized the disparity
| in biology the same ways people rationalize the disparity
| in CS.
| dekhn wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem
| like the first reasonable target: all job categories,
| except for ones that require people to be a specific gender
| for some reason, should have participation roughly
| proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other
| attribute) in society.
|
| I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said
| above was working a model where 50% women participation
| seemed like the expected amount.
| esja wrote:
| Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a
| specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how
| you are going to persuade a huge number of women who
| wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become
| carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men
| to do the reverse. That is what your target requires
| (across many occupations). It will never happen.
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm not trying to push people into roles they don't want
| (I think I've made clear that the approach I described is
| a simple one to start at, not a good policy). My model in
| this case (which doesn't really map to reality) is
| "gender preference for roles is unbiased uniform random".
|
| I don't really think job preferences are that strongly
| encoded in gender, I think far more men could be
| kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although
| men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of
| extra work because people don't trust men with kids as
| much.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > all job categories, except for ones that require people
| to be a specific gender for some reason, should have
| participation roughly proportional to the proportion of
| that gender (or other attribute) in society.
|
| Why?
| visarga wrote:
| Where is the free will of individuals factored in? I
| mean, if people in group A don't want to do job B, should
| we force them to reach parity?
|
| I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let
| people decide.
| dekhn wrote:
| that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good
| start.
|
| It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what
| the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles
| would be. A simple first order approximation is "no
| preference".
| dionidium wrote:
| > _A simple first order approximation is "no
| preference"._
|
| That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it
| seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as
| societies become more equal, gender disparities in field
| choice _increase_.
|
| See: _" Countries with greater gender equality have a
| lower percentage of female STEM graduates"_ (https://www.
| sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...)
| rajin444 wrote:
| I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will
| result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X
| group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not
| have enough understanding to draw any meaningful
| conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should
| be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination,
| but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will
| likely always be men).
|
| I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as
| individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive
| (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are
| much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we
| are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity
| explaining discrepancies in human populations.
| asdff wrote:
| I think the training environment at the undergraduate level
| is still toxic for women. I graduated 4 years ago, and while
| I wasn't in the CS program I had a female friend who was and
| she often lamented how isolating that program could be. This
| was a huge program at a huge school (50k undergrad), yet she
| was often one of only a few women in the program, and as she
| progressed she became even more of a minority as others
| switched majors. Of course there were hardly any women
| professors or role models as well.
|
| Engineering is a field that selects for a certain
| personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here
| knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty
| arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with
| the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class,
| and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that
| encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck
| with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps
| with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside
| CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from
| the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men,
| especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a
| high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend
| before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic,
| maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for
| cheap laughs among their male friends.
|
| In majors with more representation among women, you are less
| likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have
| to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more
| likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as
| you, and are more likely to see through the major without
| switching to another one.
| ku-man wrote:
| When you say engineering, you are referring to actual
| engineering right?, e.g. civil, mechanical, etc
| 13415 wrote:
| Maybe linguistics vs. philosophy is a good example. They are
| not too different from each other and I've studied both of
| them. My impression has always been that male vs. female
| linguistics professors were roughly 50:50, whereas at least
| in the past there were way more male than female philosophy
| professors. It seems to be getting better now in philosophy,
| though.
|
| However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never
| bothered to check the figures.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| We've known misandry in academia is real for a generation.
|
| Let's get organized.
| GNU_James wrote:
| White guy here. No regular male is silly enough to stay on
| University here. Think about it. There are lots of foreigners but
| no locals.
| coolspot wrote:
| How your skin color is relevant?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The point is that status is low and working conditions poor
| and you're not respected - see the lack of American STEM grad
| students who realize they are basically pawns of the profs
| and administration who just listen to the lawyers and
| undergrads who pay the bills (outside of top research
| institutions)
| coolspot wrote:
| But foreigners can be white too (Europe, Russia, Asia) with
| all the implications, so the OP's skin color is not
| relevant here.
| pattakak wrote:
| Stop being so pedantic about this and take it from an
| American perspective. The amount of grad students in my
| school's department from Europe is very low, and the
| amount of American grad students is also very low. That's
| what he's trying to get at here.
| GNU_James wrote:
| I am in eastern Europe and our foreign students are all
| from Asia. Huge mental shortcut.
| micdr0p wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210309182923/https://www.econo...
| GoodJokes wrote:
| sweet another boys vs. girls thread.
| codevark wrote:
| That's right, the women are smarter.
| viach wrote:
| Isn't this considered incorrect nowadays - to publicly generalize
| a superiority of a group of humans with dimension by race or
| gender?
| nemo44x wrote:
| It has nothing to do with superiority. More girls are "average"
| than boys. More boys are "brilliant" than girls but also more
| are "dumb". It's about variance and distribution of intellect
| among each sex. A boy is more likely to be a genius or a dolt
| than a girl and a girl is more likely to be competent than a
| boy overall.
| FactCore wrote:
| I find your sentiment interesting, but we can't ignore a fact
| in favor of not hurting people's feelings. Of course, more
| research is always being done, so I'm sure in a few years a new
| research paper will come out and we will hear a different facts
| about a certain gender's academic performance. Then next big
| paper comes out and the cycle repeats.
|
| That's just my two cents anyways.
| cmdshiftf4 wrote:
| Have you been living in a cave for the past 10 years?
| tester756 wrote:
| What makes you think that he's been living in cave?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Because culturally the world (At least the western world)
| has the complete opposite attitude.
|
| Feelings are more important than facts to many people
| nowadays.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Feelings are more important than facts to many people
| nowadays.
|
| is it good or bad in your opinion?
| tester756 wrote:
| >different facts
|
| or fabricated papers heh
| viach wrote:
| > but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's
| feelings
|
| This should be either a perfectly put sarcastic statement or
| a result of living in a sort of cultural isolation in the
| past decade.
| tester756 wrote:
| why?
| p0nce wrote:
| Super interesting page:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
| 99_00 wrote:
| It's because women are better at school.
| kderbyma wrote:
| This is one of those cases where you get the outcome you design
| for....they don't know they designed a system that is better
| suited for women. biology affects men's and women differently.
| that's why if you notice. most of the difference shows up during
| and after puberty. small children are not very different (when
| controlled for environmental bias)
| [deleted]
| ganzuul wrote:
| Bypass paywall: https://archive.is/E6NWK
|
| I kinda suspect not a lot of people are reading TFA since no one
| has noticed it's paywalled.
| guerrilla wrote:
| To be fair, it wasn't paywalled for me. But you're right,
| nobody is addressing the explanations given in the article and
| instead making up their own.
| throwgender123 wrote:
| I've noticed throughout my life that negative outcomes that
| primarily affect females (math test scores, wage gap, etc) are
| Huge Problems That Demand Immediate Action, and negative outcomes
| that primarily affect males (language test scores, life
| expectancy gap) are just kind of how it is. I'm not bitching
| about it or pushing an agenda, but it's not subtle.
| berdario wrote:
| Maybe?
|
| the wage gap has clear reasons (mens' jobs are better paid,
| women get promoted less) and thus clear solutions (stop
| discriminating against women at hiring/promotion time, or
| improve women's retention thus allowing them to stick in a job
| for longer, improving their chances at a promotion), even if
| these solutions are easier said than done.
|
| the life expectancy gap instead... what are the reasons? I
| suspect that in some cultures it can be because of gender-
| specific abuse of alcohol... but if that's the reason ( or even
| if otherwise if the reason is biological) I'm not sure that we
| have an obvious solution to the problem.
|
| Also, I presume that language test score could be as concerning
| as math test scores... but the latter will help students pursue
| a STEM career, which is better remunerated than a career that
| makes use of knowledge of languages. From that point of view,
| to improve opportunities later in life, fixing math scores can
| have priority.
| standardUser wrote:
| Generally speaking, the clearly oppressed and disadvantaged
| group is the one we focus on in terms of equity. Men are not,
| nor have they ever been, that group.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Men are the disadvantaged group when you look at things they
| do worse than women though. There's no such thing as being
| disadvantaged overall.
| busterarm wrote:
| You know that the article is about a study demonstrating that
| women are outachieving men academically, right? It's outright
| suggesting that there is some as-of-yet-identified
| disadvantage there.
|
| So while you say "no, not ever", I say "are you even having
| the same conversation we are?"
| ganzuul wrote:
| Being coerced into fighting wars that have nothing to do with
| you is clearly oppressive. Maintaining a society which
| accepts this, is oppressive. Violence for entertainment is
| male-focused, and oppressive.
|
| Men are very, very oppressed. A few who have escaped into
| financial independence does not make a trend.
| garmaine wrote:
| Maybe we should be focusing on outcomes and equality, not
| equity?
| Veen wrote:
| It may be true that men have historically dominated the top
| of most institutions--that most "oppressors" are men--but it
| doesn't follow that the majority of men are privileged or
| that most women are oppressed and disadvantaged, especially
| in modern western societies.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Yes, that is called the "apex fallacy."
| dudul wrote:
| You're literally commenting on an article that shows you that
| boys are the disadvantaged group.
| zepto wrote:
| This is the problem with making it about sex or gender.
|
| 'Men' as a category may not be that group with respect to
| 'Women' as a category.
|
| But there are a huge number of men who are in fact, just as
| disadvantaged as a huge number of women even if that number
| is marginally smaller.
|
| There is no reason at all why those men's problems should not
| be receiving the same attention that women's problems are
| receiving, other than the framing as a response to oppression
| of groups.
| LanceH wrote:
| This is the issue with scoping our solutions based on
| identity rather than to those suffering the symptoms we
| would like to address.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| In America, the chances of you being mutilated (non-medically
| necessary circumcision) are astronomically higher as a man
| than as a woman.
|
| Men have been that group when it comes to their foreskin.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Eh, I think it will average out eventually.
|
| New political currents hate ambiguity and nuance. If you're
| trying to motivate people to rise up against the Empire, the
| last thing you want to hear is people saying "Okay, but some
| imperial officers are actually good people, and this Saw
| Guerrera is a sadistic monster", even though both are true.
|
| Eventually, once the Rebellion becomes widespread enough,
| people start saying "Okay, the Empire was awful and we're glad
| it's gone, but maybe we should cut back on the whole hunt-down-
| every-single-ex-stormtrooper-and-murder-them-and-their-family
| thing".
|
| I hope, anyway.
| throwgender123 wrote:
| > Eh, I think it will average out eventually.
|
| I agree, which is why I'm not bitching about it. But it's
| also kind of sad. I have a young son, and even at 5yo he has
| seen enough "yay girls!" messages in books and cartoons to
| deduce that there's something wrong with being a boy.
|
| It's also a good example of the societal construction of
| concepts like "oppression". The idea that women earning less
| for the same work is a huge problem, and that men doing more
| dangerous jobs and dying younger isn't, is a subjective
| choice we've made. And the problem isn't so much that it's
| wrong, but that we don't have to choose. We _could_ decide
| that they 're both problems, but we don't. And I think the
| reason has a lot to do with the heavily-downvoted sibling
| comment saying, "Well, we worry about the oppressed people,
| and men aren't oppressed."
| screye wrote:
| As long as males have to compete to woo females, the natural
| order will persist.
|
| Every species on earth shows us this: "males are disposable,
| females matter". A 1M:100F ratio can revive an extinct species.
| A 1F:100M ratio is a blood bath. There are zero incentives for
| powerful men to help underperforming men, while women have
| neither natural nor sociological pressures stopping them from
| helping other women.
|
| For better or for worse, we are barreling towards a point where
| male underachievement won't be ignorable. More than 50% of
| women will have to 'settle' for a man with worse career
| prospects. Scarily enough, if women choose to continue acting
| oblivious while wielding their primary evolutionary bargaining
| chip (-\\_(tsu)_/-) to their fullest, then at least a couple of
| generations of men will waste away before a proper equilibrium
| is reached.
|
| Ofc, this is a hypothesis that leans too heavily into our
| animalistic tendencies and their stranglehold over all societal
| developments. I also don't want this to come off as an MRA
| rant. Just a few ideas I wanted to put out there.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| > while women have neither natural nor sociological pressures
| stopping them from helping other women
|
| Doesn't pass reality check IME
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I realize that this isn't terribly PC, but isn't it possible that
| testosterone is negatively correlated with attention span and
| compliance and positively correlated with risk taking? You
| certainly see it in other species. Without any value judgment at
| all, I would expect this would manifest in different outcomes in
| academic settings versus competitive markets. That is, it seems
| likely to me that some of this is due to innate differences
| between men and women.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Except that boys don't have elevated testosterone as children.
|
| There are a couple of points in very early life, then not until
| puberty.
|
| You could still point to the indirect effects of elevated T
| during infancy.
| waterheater wrote:
| PC or not, academic literature supports your views.
|
| http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publica...
|
| "Thus, high levels of testosterone are associated with
| willingness to incur greater risk in both sexes."
|
| In my experience, this view has loose ties to ADHD,
| specifically regarding the hunter-farmer hypothesis:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis
|
| Doesn't say it in the article, but Hartmann's main book on ADHD
| discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of
| those tested were "positive" for ADHD.
|
| I believe we're looking at evolutionary aftereffects of
| generations of family-based societies where men hunt and women
| run the family.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Thanks. I don't have any education in this arena, but I know
| for certain why we geld male riding horses. It radically
| changes their disposition.
| musingsole wrote:
| It takes a skilled rider to even think about riding a
| stallion. Geldings are puppies in comparison.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I think testosterone increases self-confidence, which in turn
| is incredibly helpful when it comes to things like negotiation,
| interviews, and just selling oneself.
| [deleted]
| f430 wrote:
| lower testosterone is beneficial
|
| - less sexual ruminations
|
| - emotional intelligence and organization
|
| - cooperation over leadership
|
| - retains better short and long term memories
|
| - female adult role model is more likely to be available and
| present
|
| Unfortunately HN is dominated by testosterone driven gender so
| its impossible to have any sort of civilized discussions about
| this.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Source your extraordinary claims (probably BS).
| f430 wrote:
| I think your comment confirms my original points.
|
| downvote away to confirm your self fulfilling biases.
| lamp987 wrote:
| Evidence is a male thing? Thats rather sexist.
| hu3 wrote:
| I tend to agree that females can be better. But in different
| ways and there's a caveat. Here goes my n=1.
|
| I have the privilege to work with a female developer and she's
| amazing. By far the most productive among our team of devs in
| terms of feature output.
|
| Her concentration is unmatched as if she was on adderall all
| day but she doesn't take any drug.
|
| However her peak in terms of technical excellence is not as
| high as some of the male developers. Her code is good but not
| the best. And that's fine.
|
| Once during lunch I asked if she knew any other female dev so
| we could bring to the team. She smiled and promptly replied:
| "No way I'm working with other girls. They are too chatty,
| dishonest and tend to pull the carpet from under you. I say
| that because I'm a girl and I would rather work with guys."
|
| Needless to say I was not expecting that response.
|
| One thing I noticed is she can multitask much better than us
| male developers on the team. My context switching cost is quite
| high to the point I get annoyed when I have too much on my
| plate while her limit for juggling simultaneous tasks seems to
| be much higher.
|
| I guess what I wanted to say is that, from my experience, both
| females and males often excel in different things. And I'd
| wager that's related to hormones like my parent wrote.
| tester756 wrote:
| >- cooperation over leadership
|
| In full women environments too?
|
| I always felt or heard that e.g team made fully/majority of
| women tends to be anything but cooperative.
|
| I felt like a lot of dishonesty was in those teams
| f430 wrote:
| nash equilibrium
| lamp987 wrote:
| Nice b8
| tqi wrote:
| I dislike this line of reasoning. Gender equality is important
| because equality is important in and of it self.
|
| When people point to studies that show "teams with women
| perform better" as the reason to push for diverse hiring, I
| think it subtly implies that if this were not true then we
| would not need to worry about it, and creates an opening for
| people to quibble over research methodology.
| refraincomment wrote:
| Whatever the results say, women are discriminated and they need a
| pay rise and more acknowledgement. Data will say whatever we tell
| them.
| ipnon wrote:
| Do we want equality in this area? Should we change schooling to
| make it easier for boys than girls until we get to 50/50
| achievement? Or should we retain the status quo to boost the
| chances of women succeeding later in their lives when they do not
| achieve in their careers at the same level as men?
| tomp wrote:
| I often considered that... in particular, because I (as a white
| male) am more bothered by the girl-boy discrepancy than by the
| black-white-Asian discrepancy (in the US).
|
| Why? Is it just self-serving prioritization?
|
| Reflecting more, I don't think it is. I'm naively assuming that
| the girl-boy difference is likely biological (either female
| brains are different than male brains, or the differences in
| sex & reproduction result in equivalent human brains pursuing
| different life strategies in different bodies), while black-
| white-Asian difference is likely social, probably related to
| culture and poverty level (i.e. no brain differences).
|
| It follows that in order to optimize for social good &
| progress, we should adapt the education system so that both
| female-ish and male-ish types of brains flourish (note that
| there is likely significant overlap) _yet_ we should help
| people out of poverty (which might involve changing education,
| but also probably other, much more significant efforts) and
| change culture (make schooling & achievement more important
| and popular) to reduce white-black-Asian gap.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Don't disadvantage young men for the troubles older generations
| have caused. They did not want to be the scapegoat of women of
| older generations being held back by society in any form.
|
| Frankly, all the quotas and other artificial constructions to
| help women should already tip people off that disadvantaging
| young men further will only cause more and more resentment.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Yes. No. No.
|
| We have known what the problem is and what the solution is for
| a long time. - Standard curriculum for non-standard children,
| and finding out what makes a child special and encouraging that
| at the expense of other things.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| I think the best situation would be to mostly separate boys and
| girls in classes. We could then do things for boys that are
| generally better for boys and do things for girls that are
| generally better for girls. There probably should be co-ed
| schools so boys and girls can still socialize during lunch and
| other breaks, just not during classes.
| ipnon wrote:
| One problem: separate public education for boys and girls is
| illegal in the US.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| There are non-coed schools (not sure about coed schools but
| segregated classes like I am advocating for?) in the US.
| Not sure if only private schools are allowed to do that?
| audunw wrote:
| But some girls are like boys, and some boys are like girls in
| this regard. Gender differences fall on a spectrum.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| No matter what we do some people will not have an ideal
| education. I think this will maximize the education that
| works for the most kids. The only way we can actually have
| an ideal education would be to have 1 teacher per student.
| That is not really practical.
| 7_my_mind wrote:
| This won't sound very PC, but despite all the bullshit about
| equality, men need to be better than women. Women demand that
| men are better than women. If we are going to end up with a
| situation where women have higher income potentials than men,
| nobody will be happy. Women will feel like they cannot find
| anyone suitable and men will feel like they are inadequate.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You're right on this one, and I hope you don't see mass
| downvotes for this.
|
| Men are physically stronger and more athletic on average, and
| it's so extreme that hilarious stories like this [1] come out
| when top-tier female athletes try to compete against men in
| some sports. Woman simply do not want to be working the same
| kind of manual labor jobs at the rate that that men have for
| this reason, and it would be extremely bad for society if we
| attempted to fix this "inequality".
|
| But it's even more pronounced in dating/sexual patterns. Most
| women do not want to be "dominant" and this lack of
| "dominant" women is a huge problem for men who consider
| themselves to be "submissive". It's a very talked about issue
| for men in BDSM communities. And it's even more well known
| how a majority of women find it very hot to be "dominated"
| e.g. lightly choked [2]. Women simply will not prefer a
| society where men on average are not the "dominant" gender,
| at least in key aspects of society such as the bedroom or in
| labor intensive work.
|
| [1] https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-
| under-15-b...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
| mix/wp/2014/11/0...
| 7_my_mind wrote:
| It is also true of incomes which is mostly what I was
| talking about. Women strongly prefer men with higher
| earning potential than themselves, and this preference
| increases as financial incomes of women increase.[1]
|
| A society where women cannot find husbands with higher
| earning potentials would create a marriage crisis.
|
| [1]
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372
| TrackerFF wrote:
| In some countries, various (college/uni) majors/programs have
| their own quotas or bonus "entrance points" for gender, if the
| majors are very unbalanced. If/when over time this balance gets
| closer to 50/50, those quotas/points are removed.
| omot wrote:
| The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little embarrassing
| gentlemen. Let's be open minded and entertain the possibility
| that women are indeed more capable and that societal constructs
| drag down their career opportunities.
| johncena33 wrote:
| Yet, being a minority male in tech industry, I am regarded as
| more privileged than white women just because people of my skin
| color are more successful in tech industry. It reminds me of
| the quote from The Office "Andy Bernard does not lose contests.
| He wins them. Or he quits them because they are unfair." If
| there's evidence that supports my ideology then it's fair,
| otherwise, there's oppression.
| supercon wrote:
| Indeed, the logical conclusion for a man who has the misfortune
| to end up on the complaining side of one of these conversations
| is simply: just shut up! Thankfully you had the courage and
| security to remind us of this, before we further breach the
| code of conduct and embarrass the male gender! /s
| busterarm wrote:
| Imagine thinking that your career is the only measure of a
| successful life.
|
| Maybe career success isn't as important as we make it out to be
| and bears costs that aren't worth paying, especially for women.
| esja wrote:
| Imagine reading that men perform better in their careers, and
| saying to women:
|
| "The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little
| embarrassing ladies. Let's be open minded and entertain the
| possibility that men are indeed more capable and that societal
| constructs drag down their educational opportunities."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I don't have to imagine it; you can see that sentiment on HN
| threads about gender pretty regularly.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| You regularly see condescending comments about male
| career/educational opportunities being oppressed on HN?
|
| We must be reading very different HN posts.
| standardUser wrote:
| To do so, you would first have to imagine a world where women
| were not an oppressed and disadvantaged group throughout all
| of history. Congrats to anyone who has such a vivid
| imagination.
| wonnage wrote:
| This is not the smart comment you thought it was? Men do
| perform better, you don't have to imagine it. And it's
| clearly not because men are any more capable.
| dudul wrote:
| Maybe men are just more capable in a professional setting, and
| women more capable at school?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. As a white male, I don't feel even a bit incensed or
| threatened in any way by articles like this.
|
| Moving on....
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| And the gap is only growing.
|
| There's a budding problem for gender equality growing, and it's
| not the usual story.
|
| We're not quite ready to talk about it openly though, without the
| stated cause being toxic masculinity or something - as if that's
| a problem that has been getting worse, not better, and is somehow
| only now taking its biggest toll on boys under 15 (and even under
| 5).
|
| Alas, the answer must be doubling-down on that narrative and
| pumping the boys who can't function like girls full of ADHD meds
| - I was on Ritalin before age 12, and it does "solve the problem"
| to a workable enough degree for everyone to keep on keeping on.
| throwaway53086 wrote:
| Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much
| more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well
| in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems
| pretty natural that girls will do better.
|
| Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume
| most school administrators are women. It seems natural that
| they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than
| males.
| [deleted]
| dominotw wrote:
| Do you think it has anything to do with girls having better
| handwriting.
|
| I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was
| in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being
| able to read what i was writing.
| kaitai wrote:
| Fine and large motor skills develop unevenly across
| genders/brain structures. There may be a link here, a
| feedback loop.
| analog31 wrote:
| Today, it's typing. I've seen the difference in kids. I think
| readability may be one issue, but perhaps even more important
| is that if writing is physically awkward and painful, it
| leads to writing fewer words and doing fewer edits.
|
| My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to
| getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I
| can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a
| jiffy. Still can.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > Today, it's typing.
|
| Not for math, at least not for my kids. I was helping my
| son with his high school physics homework a few days ago,
| and IMO his poor handwriting was a genuine impediment to
| his mathematical problem-solving.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's true. My college freshman physics teacher took me
| aside after the first couple of assignments and said:
| "You'd make fewer mistakes if you could read your own
| handwriting."
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Layout is more important than handwriting for maths, no?
| leetcrew wrote:
| poorly written 7's can look like 1's, and 5's like 6's. I
| lost a lot of points in high school math because I
| couldn't read what I had just written on the previous
| line!
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| Taking notes for my maths degree I learnt to 'cross' my
| 7s and zs.
| joyeuse6701 wrote:
| I had a similar issue, made worse by the fact that I was
| left handed and writing from left to right. So aside from
| smudges, I'd visually cover what I had just written.
| Plenty of opportunities to lose train of thought or
| misread something
| 8note wrote:
| I hated writing and editing way back when. What I should
| have done looking back is use scissors and tape to patch
| different paragraphs together, rather than writing down the
| side of the page in the margins to fit in the edited text
| [deleted]
| odiroot wrote:
| > Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd
| assume most school administrators are women.
|
| That was definitely the case for me until university.
| protomyth wrote:
| Education and childcare administrators are 66.5% women in the
| USA according to https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
| mfenix wrote:
| As the father of 6 years old twins (one boy, one girl) I agree
| with this 100%. My son needs more discipline than my daughter,
| he's more likely to get into trouble at school, he likes
| physical activities, etc. almost the opposite of his sister.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _son needs more discipline_
|
| This does not seem like the right conclusion. More like
| "needs running around time and free play".
|
| Cf. e.g. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/discipline-
| problem-solutio... https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/beyond-
| discipline-article/
| garmaine wrote:
| You made a lot of assumptions in that assessment.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have 4.5 year old boy and see a lot of
| similar-aged boys and girls at the playground, etc.
| (unfortunately not as much in our/their homes, during
| this global pandemic), and from what I see most small
| kids are just incredibly active a lot of the time.
|
| They crave (and physically need) hours every day spent
| running and climbing and swinging and rolling around,
| chasing each-other, etc.
|
| Furthermore, many of them are quite self-directed and
| stubborn. They get some idea in their head about
| something to try, and then want to carry the plan through
| and can get extremely frustrated if thwarted (whether by
| the plan's intrinsic problems, or by interference from
| other people). Sometimes the plans are problematic (e.g.
| <<I wonder if I can get adult attention if I take every
| toy my younger sibling wants to play with, until they
| start sobbing>>), but often the goals/plans are perfectly
| innocuous, but adults step in and block action for poor
| reasons or no reason at all, or because the adult wants
| the kid to be focusing on something different. After
| being thwarted at a few different projects in a row, kids
| can become very agitated and defiant, or even melt down
| completely.
|
| Once the kid has accomplished their immediate goal or
| given up on it, they sometimes instantly switch to some
| completely different idea, and don't want to switch back.
|
| It is incredibly difficult to convince a big group of
| young kids (and especially boys it seems, though many
| girls are also very active) to sit still and focus on
| some specific close work without conflicts, especially
| when they have pent up energy. Trying to force them ends
| up creating a confrontation, and plenty of kids are
| looking around for ways to push boundaries and get
| attention. This is entirely normal age-appropriate
| behavior, and should not be pathologized. Letting the
| kids choose their own activities and decide when to
| switch from one to another goes a long way toward
| avoiding unnecessary bad feelings.
| garmaine wrote:
| Sure, I believe you. I'm just saying the parent you
| replied to said his son needs a lot more discipline, but
| gave no co text for that statement. Maybe he's saying
| that his son doesn't want to do chores? We don't know.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Discipline is probably the wrong word. More _training_ in
| order to succeed in an unnatural environment (modern
| school) is maybe a better way to put it.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| Or changing the unnatural environment.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Sometimes the unnatural environment is significantly more
| difficult to alter (as an individual).
| hc-taway wrote:
| Two of my kids (one a boy and one a girl) act absolutely
| nuts and "must" have something like ADHD... until you make
| sure they run around outside at least 4hrs a day,
| consistently. Then they're fine.
|
| Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for
| 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short
| Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think
| their total recess time per day is only about 30-40
| minutes, and much of the time they don't even get that
| because it's raining or too cold (pft, whatever, wear
| coats) or something else, and they have them watch a movie
| more often than not in those cases (nb. this is a "good"
| school district)
|
| We have one other kid--a girl--who doesn't seem to need
| this to not "act wild".
|
| The other trigger for "crazy" behavior seems to be when
| they're presented with unpleasant social situations and
| don't know how to deal with them. Like, say, being forced
| to be around kids who are mean to them. Gee, I wonder where
| that happens a whole bunch.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Sounds they would need partial work from home during the
| winter.
| 8note wrote:
| In a coldish part of Canada, I think I had 2.5hours of
| outside or PE time through elementary school
|
| The same amount of PE, along with became optional through
| junior high school and high school.
|
| In elementary school, recess/lunch were required to be
| spent outside (unless it's -30C or so)
|
| You could spend up to 15min at a time inside to warm up,
| dry off your mittens, and maybe grab a hot chocolate but
| after that you were kicked back outside
| zionic wrote:
| Is it time to trial desk treadmills for grade schoolers?
| :D
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| As someone that didn't get their diagnosis until I was in
| my 30s, I'd encourage you to talk to a doctor about
| what's going on. It definitely sounds like ADHD,
| particularly the social stress triggering acting out or
| avoidance.
|
| On the whole I've been fortunate in life, but it's not an
| exaggeration to say my life would be dramatically
| different if I'd learned what was going on as a kid.
| Instead it was interpreted as a character flaw: that I
| just wasn't applying myself. Even though I know that's
| wrong now intellectually, emotionally I still had that
| message beat into me for years as a kid, and that doesn't
| just go away sadly. I'd be particularly vigilant about
| teachers creating that dynamic, as sometimes they do it
| with good intentions but fail to understand doubling down
| on a "tough love" approach will utterly backfire here.
| [deleted]
| endisneigh wrote:
| I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How
| exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women
| compared to men?
|
| Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions,
| etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you
| would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Everything you 've stated (following rules and instructions,
| etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct
| you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce._
|
| In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and
| ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion.
| This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in
| small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because
| I always back it up with results
|
| In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome,
| was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their
| authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to
| catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was
| probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Women started breaking the rules as well now, as that's
| what's coming from the media. The problem is of course when
| somebody does it without providing results / breaking rules
| that they shouldn't (some of the firings from Google
| happened because of this). I expect this to normalize
| though.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Your anecdote is interesting, but without knowing how often
| women also break the same rules and ignore the same
| instructions and get results it's pretty meaningless.
|
| I mean, good for you I guess?
| aviraldg wrote:
| The rules and grading are different.
|
| In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following
| are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You _must_
| submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten
| title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real
| guidance that was provided for my school and college
| projects.)
|
| At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay
| to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual
| impact, not pointless rule-following.
| endisneigh wrote:
| None of this explains why women are capable of following
| these rules and men are not. Are you saying men are
| biologically predisposed to not follow such simple rules?
| mudita wrote:
| It is pretty well established in psychology that women
| score higher in agreeableness (in the sense of the Big 5
| trait). This difference is pretty small, the
| distributions overlap a lot, but I think, the fact, that
| women are more agreeable in general is pretty
| indisputable.
|
| As far as I know, whether the difference has biological
| or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But
| it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to
| me to suggest that it's indeed biological, see e.g. Costa
| et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits
| Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://
| www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...
|
| "In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude,
| consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across
| cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences
| we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to
| be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and
| nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with
| ideas."
| tomp wrote:
| Newer research: _Gender Differences in Personality and
| Interests: When, Where, and Why?_ (2010)
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-90
| 04....
|
| _> How big are gender differences in personality and
| interests, and how stable are these differences across
| cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I
| summarize data from two meta-analyses and three cross-
| cultural studies on gender differences in personality and
| interests. Results show that gender differences in Big
| Five personality traits are 'small' to 'moderate,' with
| the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and
| neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher
| than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people-
| things dimension of interests are 'very large' (d =
| 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-
| oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend
| to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in
| gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that
| contradicts social role theory but is consistent with
| evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison
| theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests
| appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a
| finding that suggests possible biologic influences._
|
| In particular, the differences aren't "stable accross
| cultures" but more pronounced in more gender-equal
| societies, so the difference are either (likely)
| biological, or else caused by society but in a _counter-
| intuitive_ way.
| finder83 wrote:
| When the rules are to "sit still" and "be quiet", yes,
| probably so. Boys are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate of
| 12.9% vs 5.6% for girls [1]. I've heard many counselors
| and psychologists (in my counseling program) suggest that
| many cases are misdiagnosed.
|
| Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem
| children are, and they're almost always boys. They're
| louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a
| harder time sitting still.
|
| Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a
| lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two
| parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But
| statistically there is a difference. This is true until
| they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just
| look at insurance rates.
|
| Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true
| from a very young age through young adult that boys are
| less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school
| is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we
| as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html
| chlodwig wrote:
| _Are all boys a problem?_
|
| And it should be noted -- it's not the boys that are the
| problem it is the schools.
|
| Raise young boys in a way that is completely stifling and
| unnatural compared to how boys were raised for tens of
| thousands years based on our evolution, and then diagnose
| these boys as having a mental problem. No, it is society
| that has the mental problem.
| finder83 wrote:
| Agreed entirely. The goals of our factory system
| education are not in the best interest of the individuals
| participating. We home school largely for that reason...I
| want my children, both our boy and girls, to have
| individual creative thought, to explore the world, to
| rough-house, and to not just be a "good citizen" of
| society. Good citizens rarely make the world a better
| place.
|
| I want them to challenge, think, be introduced to the
| complexity and darkness of history, be able to creatively
| write and imagine, and to not fall in line with whatever
| the societal expectations and agendas are for the week.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Careful though. Go too far in the opposite direction from
| "rule following good citizen" and you get conspiracy
| believers, YouTube Do-Your-Researchers, and Anti-Maskers.
| There needs to be a middle ground.
| finder83 wrote:
| Sure, but to me that's on a different spectrum/axis from
| being independent thinkers. Both extremes on the axis of
| being a good citizen or being a conspiracy theorist are
| still following group think. But that is a concern as
| well, honestly if my kids are anything like me though
| they'll be skeptical of anything, particularly anything
| suddenly popular or extreme.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I very much doubt those two concepts are related.
| kaitai wrote:
| Honestly, as an educator and a parent, I find the "sit
| still and conform" nature of school quite frustrating
| even though I did fine with it. I'm female, and I do
| think that part of my doing fine with it is that I
| quietly went off to break the rules and because I was a
| "good kid" (white, female, high grades) no one even
| bothered to check on me to discover my extracurricular
| sins. But I want better for my kid than quietly and
| efficiently producing the answers the teacher wants to
| hear. That approach does not lead to excellence in
| science, mathematics, or the arts. It doesn't even serve
| those who do well in the system. What, after all, are the
| benefits to these girls who do well in school? All that
| education just to get jobs that pay worse? It's a racket.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of your assertions, but it
| remains a mystery how women then are excluded from top
| jobs if they do better in middle school through college
| and are less likely to be diagnosed with something that
| would impair their job performance.
| scarmig wrote:
| Landing a "top job" is a zero sum game: on top of skill
| and intellect, you've also got to put in more labor and
| hours than anyone else to get there. For a large
| constellation of reasons, women are more likely to choose
| to put extra hours into childcare, and men are more
| likely to choose to put extra hours into the kind of
| market labor that lends itself to reaching those top tier
| jobs.
| kaitai wrote:
| It's not a mystery to me. If I want to excel at my job, I
| have to be willing to tell my boss he's full of shit and
| then elbow someone else out of line to get my idea
| implemented. This is not what I practiced in school for
| all that time and it's not what I get rewarded for in the
| rest of my life.
|
| Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that
| they're disproportionately represented in the highest-
| paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle,
| doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward.
| I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which
| 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served
| well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the
| wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly
| not doing that well for America given our susceptibility
| to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills
| rather than effectively developing talent here.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Young women now earn more than young men on average. Most
| high paying jobs go to people near the end of their
| career who are part of a different generation. I think
| it's too early to know if young women are still
| discriminated against in the workplace.
| finder83 wrote:
| I don't think it's simple enough to give a single answer
| to or to be able to answer entirely (and I'm not an
| expert at all), but I think there's a lot of
| factors...sexism, the competition at the top level and
| the natural aggressiveness of men, rewarding aggression
| in business, the negative view of babies and women with
| families in culture (again, sexism).
|
| Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is
| that success in school does not predict success in a job.
| The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the
| traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet,
| listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the
| status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to,
| not challenging others...none of those things are traits
| you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think
| that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're
| rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is
| profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top
| company.
|
| I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and
| that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some
| really fascinating talks about personality traits between
| men and women and why personality traits in men lend
| toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in
| competitive business.
| imtringued wrote:
| No, it sounds like female teachers make rules that are
| easy for female students to follow. Meanwhile some boys
| simply don't like the rules and thus don't follow them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes I've seen this comment many, many times. Where's the
| proof? Women crush men in college (see link below) yet
| most professors are men. People are just spouting
| unsupported nonsense. Heck my link understates the
| difference as it is old.
|
| https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long
| _Ma...
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| There is at least the "women are wonderful" effect
| covering both why female _as well as male_ teachers may
| favor girls over boys, including subjective grading
| methods. That seems enough of a point to counter this
| being "unsupported nonsense".
|
| Additionally, pointing out most professors are men does
| not counter the argument. Merely the transition of going
| from a highly cooperation- and rule-following-favored
| environment to an extremely competitive environment
| should give some indication as to how multifaceted this
| problem can truly be.
| endisneigh wrote:
| That just seems like a convenient excuse. Do you have any
| actual data to support your claim? I notice that no one
| ever posts any peer-reviewed research, just a bunch of
| anecdotes.
|
| Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that
| benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school
| setting a same sex relationship between teacher and
| student is such that the student benefits. However this
| clearly isn't the case per my college performance
| citation.
|
| Your claimed "women are wonderful" effect seems to stop
| conveniently at the career stage of life.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The "women are wonderful" effect doesn't stop. I would
| ask you actually search around a little and read my point
| again, as well as the many other comments, before
| dragging down the conversation with phrases such as
| "convenient excuse".
|
| As other comments have pointed out, the reason can easily
| be explained by a paradigm shift. One which shifts from a
| cooperation-favored environment, to a competition-favored
| environment. Though there is an absence of evidence, the
| absence of evidence doesn't prove the opposite, it merely
| puts into question the hypothesis.
|
| > Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules
| that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a
| school setting a same sex relationship between teacher
| and student is such that the student benefits. However
| this clearly isn't the case per my college performance
| citation.
|
| The GP stated this goes _for women_. Clearly, that doesn
| 't claim the same goes _for men_. In fact, this is
| entirely in-line with the "women are wonderful"
| phenomenon, though I would personally believe other
| factors are at play beyond this.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > The "women are wonderful" effect doesn't stop. I would
| ask you actually search around a little and read my point
| again, as well as the many other comments, before
| dragging down the conversation with phrases such as
| "convenient excuse".
|
| How do you reconcile this with discrimination towards
| women?
|
| Also the whole trope that women somehow cannot compete
| and can only collaborate, as if the two things are at
| odds, is also exhausting.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| There are multiple possible explanations as to why they
| won't compete. One of them is incapability through
| biological inferiority, which I highly doubt is the case.
| Another is systematic bias. Another is really as simple
| as _not wanting to_. Again, please read what is actually
| written, not what you want to answer to.
|
| Frankly, this "discrimination towards women" may as well
| be turned around with one simple trick. Which of the two
| sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be
| judged based on their ambition and achievements? Last
| time I checked, women are a lot more judgmental of their
| partner's ambition, earning capabilities, career, and
| similar traits than men are, frequently to the point of
| wanting a guy who is relatively "better" than themselves.
| You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When
| your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to all
| those things, which can be found in a field emphasizing
| competitiveness, surely you can imagine men respond by
| being more competitive.
|
| Now imagine your worth isn't as tied to this, you have
| all these men with a very clear incentive to compete keep
| trying to one-up another. It isn't a secret people give
| up easier when the challenge is too difficult compared to
| the reward, and assuming above, women clearly have less
| of a reward at the end of this.
|
| Convenient excuses? Probably. Frankly, the entire
| "oppression" narrative is awfully convenient when put
| under the right angle. So instead of knee-jerking towards
| all this, let's stop this "trope" as well and address the
| problem for the multifaceted issue it truly is.
|
| Edit: as replying to the below is no longer an option and
| apparently my "competition" claim is "unsubstantiated",
| it seems I have to point out the obvious. Women still
| largely go for men outearning them rather than equals,
| let alone lower.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full
| /10.1111/jomf.12372) Additionally, money helps men more
| than women when it comes to cushioning traits of lower
| value (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/
| pii/S10905...) Though I guess one peer-reviewed study
| tracking diaries says more than entire countries filled
| with anecdotal data of women more willing to work part
| time even when not caring for kids.
| endisneigh wrote:
| One thing I'm always surprised with is how people are so
| confident in their own baseless, unsubstantiated claims.
|
| Your entire comment basically is based off your own bias.
| Research can and already has been done on this issue,
| showing that you're probably wrong. I implore you to read
| this paper which already puts to rest your outdated
| notions that men are somehow more competitive than women.
| I'd like to emphasize the following with respect to
| competition and finances: > The same line
| of reasoning might lead to the expectation that
| men should compete more about financial success
| than women do, since this would make them more
| attractive to women. The data, however, do not support
| this: there was no sex difference in the strength of
| competitive feeling about attaining financial success,
| nor were there consistent differences in the fraction of
| diary entries concerned with things that might be
| thought to lead to financial success, such as success at
| school; in fact, in Study 1 women had a larger
| fraction of diary entries about success at work
| than men did.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13644511_Are_men
| _mo...
|
| No worries though, I'll just believe your baseless
| conjecture instead of a peer-reviewed paper.
| kaitai wrote:
| If you think women aren't competing and being judged,
| simply with another set of criteria, you've... not talked
| to a lot of women.
|
| Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth
| as partner be judged based on their [looks, and maybe
| second emotional support]? Last time I checked, [men] are
| a lot more judgmental of their partner's [looks] than
| [women] are, frequently to the point of wanting a [gal]
| who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think
| that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth
| as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to [this one
| primary thing, and then the emotional support bit], which
| can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness,
| surely you can imagine [women] respond by ... well, what
| am I supposed to fill in here? But if you think carefully
| about this, being agreeable (what's optimized for in this
| school stuff) is other than appearance probably the
| single most important currency a woman has.
| aviraldg wrote:
| I was answering your question about why this difference
| exists. I don't know about the reason, but if I had to
| guess I'd say it's not biology, but culture/upbringing. I
| think girls are culturally expected to follow rules, and
| boys encouraged to break them.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'd suspect it's biological, since boys in (almost?) all
| human societies are more prone to challenging authority.
| It's the same story in elephants, chimps and wolves too.
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case in all species
| of social mammals.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| >At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically
| okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on
| actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
|
| Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule"
| and doing something where you see actual impact/results is
| world of a difference.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions,
| etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct
| you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
|
| That might be true if you ignored development, but we're
| talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the
| same as a 23 year old man.
| endisneigh wrote:
| this would be true, but these patterns still exist in
| college.
|
| https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_M
| a...
| 1_player wrote:
| Perhaps, presuming OP's assumption that women have an easier
| time to follow the rules and there are more women in
| education than men is correct, that school has a lot of rules
| and not enough freedom.
|
| I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school
| was a really strict place compared to real life and work.
| There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to
| think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You
| could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of
| the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher
| had intended you to.
|
| As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember
| enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the
| first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to
| put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected
| of me.
| hc-taway wrote:
| > As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly
| remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself
| after work the first few years after I dropped out of high
| school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then
| nothing else was expected of me.
|
| Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd
| have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far
| the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to
| the sheer amount of time it took and the constant,
| overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines.
| College was a vacation. Work is easy.
|
| High school did little to prepare me for "how the real
| world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and
| requirements and such in school) but did harm me
| psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get
| over--and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it
| was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of
| freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that),
| and crazy workload.
| visarga wrote:
| The difference in teaching style is putting accent on
| cooperation vs competition.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| * Lots of sitting still. My local school canceled recess
| several years ago to make sure the kids had more studying
| time.
|
| * Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often
| explicitly as part of the grade.
|
| * Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they
| don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks
| students to write and make a presentation about their math
| answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as
| long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Also, most teachers are women.
|
| Probably true for half a century now. And yet.
| akudha wrote:
| Another thing I've noticed is that girls are generally much
| better at taking exams than boys. I don't have any numbers,
| just from observation - from my own school days, from observing
| my niece/nephew. It is super painful to get my nephew to do the
| homework vs my niece, for example.
| 0xy wrote:
| Don't forget that teachers give artificially low marks to boys
| for identical work. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
| pmarreck wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted?
| justaman wrote:
| This forum has become increasingly afraid of anything that
| contradicts their own world views.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > It seems natural
|
| You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think
| it means, because it's the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal
| to intuition
|
| > girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions
|
| So is that difference a problem, then? Or not? Or neither? You
| can't force people to take a risk they aren't comfortable with,
| and if boys (for whatever reason) are a little less risk-
| averse, what is there to do? Punish boys for taking risks as we
| praise girls for doing the same?
| tompazourek wrote:
| Girls the same age are more mature than boys. They develop
| differently. Maybe that's a factor?
| kzrdude wrote:
| What do we mean by mature though? It's a kind of bias to
| prefer one over the other, when it's simply different.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| If by mature we mean respecting tasks and duties, why don't
| we count duties to your own psyche and body into it?
|
| Being an adult is sometimes finding some occupancy that
| with minimum amount of time will give us the psychological
| comfort to do the maximum amount of paid work through the
| rest of the week (or day). Why don't we teach kids that
| being mature is caring for our needs too, instead of
| pushing them into the square hole of just duties that are
| demanded of them by everyone else.
| tomp wrote:
| I've always heard this as a kid/young adult but as I've grown
| older, I've noticed that most people don't _ever_ mature
| (well, at least not until 35-ish) so I 've started doubting
| all claims and folk-wisdom about maturity pretty much
| wholesale...
| mpweiher wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not.
|
| However: if it were the other way around, would that ever be
| an acceptable answer nowadays?
| einpoklum wrote:
| > would that ever be an acceptable answer nowadays?
|
| Changes in public sensibility regarding sex and gender are
| not a good basis to reject GP' claim.
|
| Of course, "girls develop earlier then boys" itself may
| have other, underlying, causes.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Like environmental hormone response?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I see a lot of people in this thread speaking in generalities
| or correlations around gender.
|
| Is this OK, or not? I thought it wasn't OK, so I tend to
| avoid it, even if I think some of it may be true, but isn't
| stereotyping anyone based on attributes something we are
| trying NOT to do?
| [deleted]
| aviraldg wrote:
| I don't agree with the rest of your comment (my school had a
| pretty even mix of male and female teachers), but anecdotally
| the primary difference between boys and girls was exactly what
| you mentioned: the former were more likely to skip classes,
| study things that were not in the syllabus (which helps
| sometimes), not maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter
| would typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions
| etc. more closely and maintain very thorough notes.
| esja wrote:
| Male primary school teachers are a tiny minority, and that's
| true globally.
| iagovar wrote:
| > the former were more likely to skip classes, study things
| that were not in the syllabus (which helps sometimes), not
| maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter would
| typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions etc.
| more closely and maintain very thorough notes.
|
| Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not
| in the US, if that holds any value.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I also completely agree with throwaway53086 & with aviraldg
| about why the girls always perform better academically,
| especially in the primary school, because what they said
| matches perfectly my experience.
|
| I grew in Europe and, until I was about 10 years old, I
| firmly believed that the girls must be much smarter than
| the boys, precisely because they always received much
| better grades at school.
|
| Alas, eventually I was disappointed and I lost this belief,
| when I understood that the good grades received by the
| girls were determined only partially by their knowledge of
| the subjects on which they were graded and that a large
| part of the grades was caused exactly as throwaway53086
| said, because the girls were "much more likely to obey
| rules and instructions".
|
| Looking back to the previous years, it became obvious for
| me that every time when a girl and a boy proved to have
| identical knowledge about mathematics or biology or
| whatever else was tested, the disciplined girl received a
| high grade, while the naughty boy received a low grade.
|
| The girls always did whatever the teacher asked, while the
| boys failed to do homework, did not pay attention to what
| the teacher taught and so on.
|
| At that time I was reading a huge amount of books, so even
| when I was nine-year old there were some fields, e.g.
| biology, about which I knew far more than my teacher.
|
| Obviously, pointing to errors in what the teacher taught
| was also a recipe for low grades, in comparison to those
| who did not question her wisdom.
|
| In primary school, everybody that I knew had the same
| experience, with the grades that were influenced by the
| discipline and obedience demonstrated, which favored a lot
| the girls.
|
| In high school and university, I have no longer seen such
| cases, the grades received by everybody were mostly
| correct, but the girls continued to be on average much more
| disciplined and obedient, which resulted in good grades
| across the curriculum.
|
| On the other hand, many boys liked only some subjects at
| which they obtained good grades, while neglecting the
| others, at which they obtained low grades, resulting in a
| low average.
|
| In high school and university there was also the same
| problem that I had first encountered in the primary school,
| that with the exception of the best teachers, the teachers
| who were not so good themselves gave good grades only to
| the mediocre students, while both the bad students and the
| very good students (who knew more than the teacher about
| what was taught) received low grades.
|
| The girls were usually not affected by this, because even
| when they knew that the teacher was wrong, they would not
| confront him or her about the errors.
| kaitai wrote:
| This has a lot to it, and I believe this is one of the
| thing that holds women back later on in their careers --
| if you are rewarded as a girl for going along/allowing
| people to save face, you have practiced skills that don't
| serve you as well in business and academia. I have had to
| practice telling people they're wrong in an effective
| way. Other factors are at play, of course, but this is an
| important component.
|
| Lots of socialization going on.
| protomyth wrote:
| In the US, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm shows that
| female teachers are 98.8% of preschool and kindergarten
| teachers and 79.6% of elementary and middle school teachers.
|
| If your school had _a pretty even mix of male and female
| teachers_ then your school was the exception.
| dijit wrote:
| My own anecdatum indicates that the parent is right though.
|
| 20 female teachers. 1 male.
|
| No males on the senior staff.
| groby_b wrote:
| Or... we could look at data? No?
|
| LAUSD: ~4.5:1 in elementary school, ~1:1 in secondary, ~4:1
| in special ed[1]
|
| Across all CA public schools: ~2.5:1 [2]
|
| Across the US: 3:1 [3]
|
| So, more women? Yes. 20:1? Wild outlier.
|
| So, what about the claim that it's more women, somehow
| building a system more friendly to girls? Turns out the
| data says "not so much" there, too. Principals are roughly
| 1:1[4]
|
| [1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity
| /doma... [2] https://www.ed-data.org/state/CA [3]
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp [4] http
| s://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp#:~:text=I...
| .
| jfim wrote:
| According to your data, a 20:1 ratio could be explained.
| The first figure of your link [3] shows that the ratio
| for elementary level teachers is 89:11.
|
| Plugging these numbers into R shows that it's not exactly
| a surprising result: >
| prop.test(1,21,p=11/100) 1-sample
| proportions test with continuity correction
| data: 1 out of 21, null probability 11/100
| X-squared = 0.31913, df = 1, p-value = 0.5721
| alternative hypothesis: true p is not equal to 0.11
| groby_b wrote:
| Yep - my mistake, I only looked at the LAUSD data for
| elementary schools, and then at total numbers instead for
| the following data sets.
|
| This makes the "principals are 1:1" data even more
| interesting. It also lends a good chunk more weight to
| the idea that at least elementary schools are an
| environment with outsizedly more female role models.
|
| I still think the "build a system" argument doesn't hold
| - see the 1:1 data - but I'm certainly more convinced on
| "the effects of the system-as-is result in this", even
| without the conscious build step.
| bb611 wrote:
| In the US, there's a significant gender gap in administration,
| especially above the school leader level. Also, larger schools
| (middle, high) are more likely to be run by men than woman.
| dominotw wrote:
| > run by
|
| what do you mean by this ?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| in the US most middle, high schools have a top down
| organizational hierarchy (in my experience, no data on this
| point but willing to bet on it), therefore the parent
| poster is asserting that in the US most middle, high school
| top administrative officials are men (no data on if this is
| true, not willing to bet on it)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| "run by" is a common phrase used to mean the person or
| persons who make decisions. Normally the manager, or owner.
| You could say "That pizza place is run by someone from my
| neighborhood."
|
| In the context of the school it would mean the
| administration, the school board, and if its a private
| school the owners or trustees.
| legulere wrote:
| At least what I read about Germany the disadvantage of boys is
| even bigger under male teachers.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| With shrinking recess time and PE disappearing from some
| schools, I also wonder if a lot of this is caused by boys
| having more energy and needing more movement than girls. Energy
| has to go somewhere so it ends up manifesting itself in
| behaviors that are deemed "disruptive" (really, not sitting
| still and being unable to concentrate on tasks).
|
| Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers
| fail to understand.
|
| It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and
| especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and
| especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys._
|
| It's a common trope, but AFAIK ADHD has a big hereditary
| component and currently is deemed to be extremely
| underdiagnosed in girls and adults in general, so I think
| this cliche isn't holding water. I will agree that modern
| schooling is extremely good at surfacing the symptoms (but
| then so is adult life in general, if you know what to look
| for).
| zionic wrote:
| Future generations will consider us barbarians for dosing our
| young boys with drugs because we providing them with physical
| education/exercise was inconvenient to us. They'll also be
| able to datamine the internet from this time period and use
| our own words to hang us.
| grenoire wrote:
| That's a rather utopic view.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Roko's Fitness Trail?
| powersnail wrote:
| I hope that's what will happen. It means that the future
| will not need to dose people with drugs. We'll have created
| a world where people's natural physique is mostly enough
| for living a happy life.
|
| In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily
| dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It will not, because it doesn't impact the
| genetic/hereditary factors in any way. Getting your body
| in shape does not cure actual ADHD. Exercise makes it at
| best manageable for the low-severity cases.
|
| > _In a darker vision, the future society will be more
| heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age._
|
| It's kind of a given, until we transition to post-drug
| era, where we inject our bodies with nanobots that fix
| what wasn't already fixed by genetic engineering of the
| gametes.
|
| Until then, I think it's worth re-evaluating this view
| while replacing "ADHD" with "diabetes" or "hypertension"
| or "rheumatism" or "asthma" or... insert any persistent
| and disruptive condition a person may suffer from
| regardless of the shape in which they keep their body. We
| should apply drugs where they help more than they harm,
| until we have better alternatives.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Depends on the medication. If they're on stims in
| particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior,
| then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.
| teilo wrote:
| Non sequitur
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But it is, because we're talking about persistent
| deficiency of certain neurotransmitters in the brain,
| that's most likely[0] due to different brain makeup. You
| can't do enough PE to mitigate this _and_ have enough
| energy left for everything else.
|
| --
|
| [0] - I say "most likely" because I didn't investigate
| the claims that MRI can pick up on the difference. But
| from my initial difference, the effect is still
| hereditary, in at least large part genetic.
| hc-taway wrote:
| The effect of amphetamines on kids with ADHD is to
| improve school performance.
|
| The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD is to
| improve school performance.
|
| The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD but
| who've been diagnosed with ADHD because they're not
| getting enough exercise is... to improve school
| performance.
| Causality1 wrote:
| It'll be a long time yet. We haven't even moved past
| cutting pieces of them off for cosmetic reasons.
| [deleted]
| insert_coin wrote:
| What? religion has been doing that for thousands of
| years.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Indeed. My point is that we haven't matured to the point
| of respecting our children enough to not mutilate them,
| which is a far more basic accomplishment than respecting
| their psychological needs. We force teenagers to adhere
| to the sleep schedules of adults despite numerous studies
| indicating doing so damages their health and academic
| performance. There are a lot of steps between where we
| are now and a society that will condemn us as barbarians
| for not providing boys extra PE.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| > I'd assume most school administrators are women.
|
| At least in the United States, this isn't at all true. A
| disproportionate number of administrators (especially when
| adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are
| male.
|
| There have also been many studies that show that teachers call
| on boys more, praised them more (they acknowledge girls, praise
| boys), and talk with them more.
|
| So your assumptions are completely at odds with decades of
| data.
|
| [1]: https://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/
| -- has good links to various research from across the world.
| dominotw wrote:
| > A disproportionate number of administrators (especially
| when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown)
| are male.
|
| Surprised to hear this. This is opposite of my experience
| working for Chicago public schools(CPS).
| jimbokun wrote:
| Teachers grade boys more harshly than girls:
|
| https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-
| documents...
| scarmig wrote:
| Teachers also criticize boys more often, and boys' grades
| tend to increase when submitted work is anonymized.
|
| Boys and girls experience different gendered teaching
| practices, but the net result is girls being given higher
| grades than boys on average.
| alentist wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
|
| _Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls '
| schoolwork, according to an international study._
|
| _An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60
| countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared
| with boys of the same ability._
|
| _When it comes to teachers ' marking, the study says there
| is a consistent pattern of girls' work being "marked up"._
| RulingWalnut wrote:
| Do you have a citation for the number of administrators
| breakdown? I didn't see a reference in the Time article but
| maybe I missed it.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| >> I'd assume most school administrators are women.
|
| > At least in the United States, this isn't at all true.
|
| 54% female, 46% male
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It is interesting how it breaks down by
| elementary/middle/high:
|
| _Close to 68 percent of elementary school principals are
| women, while men make up 67.3% of high school principals
| and 60% of middle school principals._
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Interesting. Based on that data, this has likely flipped
| since most commenters here were in school.
| 8note wrote:
| In elementary school there were maybe 3 male teachers,
| but the non-teacher staff were all male.
|
| It's only high school where the teachers were about
| balanced, and idk about the non-teachers
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| My wife was a teacher and she noted that most over her
| male colleagues were leaving, especially in on the
| elementary and middle school level.
|
| Too many assumptions or allegations, plus the perception
| that guys can't be nurturing.
|
| Most of the men still in education were older and were
| able to migrate away from day-to-day teaching into admin
| roles. In 20 years those guys will be gone and there
| won't be any male teachers to replace them.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > Too many assumptions or allegations, plus the
| perception that guys can't be nurturing.
|
| Sounds like very hostile and sexist environment. I wonder
| what efforts the school systems take to ensure gender
| diversity among its employees.
| knorker wrote:
| In today's climate perfectly gender diverse means 100%
| women.
|
| There was a bank that bragged some years ago about being
| the most diverse bank, since they had 65% or whatever
| women on the board. 50% was explicitly less diverse than
| 65%.
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| This title seems click baity we should be asking the question as
| to why our system allows one gender to outperform the other. Not
| blanket statements of correlation == causation.
|
| Something is clearly wrong with our system which is resulting in
| one gender receiving more support. The distribution curve should
| mostly be equal, yes we are different gender wise. But for large
| majority of people our brains function mostly the same (it's not
| like girls are a different species than boys).
| ihsw wrote:
| There is no system allowing one gender to outperform the other.
| hvJ4kN wrote:
| Any research on gender past infancy has a problem in that it's
| hard to untangle what is "innate" and what is a result of
| differentiated socialization based on gender.
|
| There's a lot of speculation in this forum about whether this is
| because of different distributions of IQ, effects of
| testosterone, etc., but how can we possibly determine if these
| are true differences or the result of parents, teachers, and
| other people in society treating young children differently based
| on their gender?
| wassenaar10 wrote:
| Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue already.
|
| I'll demonstrate:
|
| Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in
| earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then
| the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a
| nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka
| "the patriarchy".
|
| On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance
| that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates,
| suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often
| people are satisfied with an explanation that says the
| disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men.
| Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates
| among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do
| worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately
| end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that
| subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault.
|
| Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how
| women generally make better grades than men, and how they
| outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The
| response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily
| translate into better employment for women". Bring up the
| substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well
| actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less
| effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the
| conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of
| pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded
| by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as
| shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.
| hvJ4kN wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your
| examples are just further cases where being sloppy about
| innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy.
|
| The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal
| social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't
| imply men are responsible for their own misfortune; this
| seems to misunderstand how society affects its members. In
| the context of violent crime, an example hypothesis would be
| that boys are taught by their families, movies, etc. that
| violence is a valuable part of being male, and because of
| this social norm, more men end up committing violent crimes.
| It seems crazy to suggest that a man affected by these
| cultural norms could have chosen to be brought up in a
| different environment; I don't know that people are
| suggesting this when they claim that patriarchal social norms
| are a problem.
| klyrs wrote:
| [baleeted]
| wassenaar10 wrote:
| I don't think you read my comment, which makes it clear
| that "Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue
| already." was meant facetiously.
| klyrs wrote:
| I read your comment. Sarcasm is an anti-pattern in
| written communication.
| puddingnomeat wrote:
| I find it curious when people agree that X doesn't matter, but
| then they go about and compare outcomes based on X
|
| in this case X=sex but it could be race, age, etc.
| learn_more wrote:
| Actions speak louder than words.
| kashkhan wrote:
| And yet this the first time a woman has become Veep.
| firefoxd wrote:
| This is anecdotal but I'm sure many people are seen this
| increasingly. In the past 10 years on the job, I'm seeing more
| guys make jokes about how stupid they are. Every time they make a
| single mistake they say "oh my God, if my head wasn't attached to
| my shoulders..."
|
| Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing.
| I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite.
|
| Turn the tables, I was in a meeting with a male and female
| coworker. The guy was saying how stupid he was, and the female
| stopped him and said: You shouldn't say that about yourself, in a
| serious tone.
|
| I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.
| learn_more wrote:
| Only confident people mock themselves.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| I have to disagree with this. While there are plenty of
| confident people who will mock themselves in humor, I've also
| known many people whose self mocking hides a very negative
| self image that needs serious if not professional help that
| they often don't get.
| hntrader wrote:
| It's the new status contest among men in technical circles.
|
| Who can self-deprecate, feign uncertainty and fake modesty in
| the most sophisticated way. Everyone is competing for the "nice
| guy" designation - or perhaps they're frightened of the
| "asshole" designation - and they're using deception as the
| means.
|
| It's reminiscent of stale scientific writing where every
| statement is hedged with endless caveats just so they can't get
| singled out for overstepping slightly.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Right, it's a mating strategy probably. I'm not sure it works
| (we tend to select towards strong men in whatever capacity is
| relevant, in this case actual intelligence) but a desperate
| man will gladly debase himself tactically if their other
| wells are dried up.
|
| People would rather be liked than respected I guess but I
| also think that many today can't tell the difference.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I wonder...
|
| After doing something stupid at work, I once said, out loud,
| "AnimalMuppet, if brains were leather, you couldn't saddle a
| flea." And 30 seconds later I was over it and back to work. I
| didn't say that because I think I'm stupid. No, I was able to
| say it because I'm sure that I'm smart. The security of being
| sure made me able to say that.
|
| I wonder if the females don't feel secure enough to say such
| things, or if they're just wired differently. (So that saying
| derogatory things about themselves, which they don't actually
| believe, is an alien concept. It sounds rather weird when I put
| it that way...)
| TimPC wrote:
| I've had a significantly different experience with this. I know
| a few men who self-deprecate when they make a mistake, but I
| know more women who do. I haven't seen it turn into a
| competition on who's done the dumbest thing because I'm seldom
| in groups where self-deprecation is widely encouraged. I've
| been the person encouraging people not to self-deprecate in
| this way, so I don't think it's really a gendered thing. I'm
| curious if this is trending differently in different age groups
| I'm almost 40.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha this is likely some sort of selection bias effect
| because I need constant validation and I have a group of
| friends who are all like that and a group of friends who are
| all not like that.
|
| If I were in one group, I reckon I'd form one opinion and if
| I were in the other I'd form the other opinion.
|
| I'd be wary of making population generalizations when one
| uses sample populations highly susceptible to selection bias:
| one's friends and one's coworkers - both of whom are usually
| selected for agreeableness with the group, either directly
| for friends or indirectly through culture fit for coworkers.
| standardUser wrote:
| Women avoid saying such self-deprecating things because they
| already have a tougher time than men being listened to, taken
| seriously, promoted, etc. Not that there aren't exceptions, but
| most women are acutely aware of how they act and are perceived
| at work because they start off at a disadvantage. I imagine few
| men ever think "will my gender get in the way of my ideas, or
| my work relationships or my career trajectory?".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Don't know why the pretty obvious explanation for why this
| sort of thing is common is downvoted.
|
| Even if you're some weirdo who thinks there is no gender
| discrimination in the workplace, you can't deny that many
| women at least perceive there to be gender discrimination,
| and one of the tips passed around is to stop self-deprecating
| yourself in front of your colleagues.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I don't know for a fact either, but would guess the reason
| is a childhood of girls telling each other nasty things
| would make them weary of harsh language even when directed
| at the self.
|
| With that part unmentioned, the GP seems to assign dubious
| priorities to human motivations.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > With that part unmentioned, the GP seems to assign
| dubious priorities to human motivations.
|
| Really? The only motivating factor assumed in the GP
| looks to be that women want to be successful in their
| careers. Is that a dubious claim?
| ganzuul wrote:
| No... Priority. Not claim.
|
| I'm saying that I think the downvotes comes from
| something GP didn't say rather than something they did
| say.
| Goosee wrote:
| > I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.
|
| Thats because girls blame it on their *astrological sign*
|
| In all seriousness, I truly believe girls mature way earlier
| than guys. Just look at insurance rates.
| hn8788 wrote:
| That's even a common trope in sitcoms. The husband is a
| loveable but bumbling idiot, while his wife is the voice of
| reason who frequently needs to save him from his own bad
| decisions. I wonder if the shows are imitating life, or the
| other way around. My wife did her master's thesis on
| discrimination based on communication, and in her research she
| found a study showing that the constant depiction of people
| with a southern accent as being stupid leads the majority of
| southern children, as young as 10 years old, to view themselves
| as inferior to people without the accent. Maybe the same is
| true with TV shows and movies frequently showing males as
| stupid.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well yeah, I have a daughter who finished high school and I've
| observed:
|
| - when I was in school I only cared about results for the
| subjects that interested me; otherwise i did just enough to pass
| - when she was in school she cared about high grades for all
| subjects
| ganzuul wrote:
| We can't attribute any meaning to your post unless you tell us
| your gender.
| njdullea wrote:
| I think the poster is making a comparison, and is therefor
| presumably male.
| ganzuul wrote:
| We are on NH, so we can assume everyone's gender with
| reasonable accuracy...
|
| But this type of assumption seems to have unforeseen
| consequences. We should question it.
| amelius wrote:
| Then why do boys/men seem better at inventing things (edit: from
| past statistics)?
| jpxw wrote:
| My understanding is that IQ is distributed such that men are
| slightly lower on average than women, but more spread out.
|
| If this is true, then it would follow that there would be more
| genius men than women, which would explain what you mention.
| amelius wrote:
| That's a good explanation. Another one, I think, is that men
| often like to take the role of "problem solver", even when it
| doesn't make sense (e.g. in relational problems). So IQ might
| not be the only reason, but also intrinsic motivation.
| wonnage wrote:
| where did you get that idea
| amelius wrote:
| Just think of any random invention, then look up on Wikipedia
| who was the inventor. Repeat a bunch of times, and you get
| the idea. (And please don't respond with cherry-picked
| examples.)
| wonnage wrote:
| Why do you think the explanation is that men are better
| inventors?
| ipnon wrote:
| If schools could teach invention then art school graduates
| would be lining the halls of the Louvre.
| standardUser wrote:
| I am sure that if men were had been subjugated by women for all
| of civilization the outcomes might have been a little
| different. We'll never know, since the only civilization we
| know is one that has oppressed women for its entirety.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Jewish people were subjugated and kept in ghettos for a
| millennium or so, even subject to pogroms and genocides.
|
| All this suffering did not seem to reduce their academic and
| technological aptitude.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Girls on average are more likely to be competent due to the lower
| variance in their intellectual ability. Boys on average have a
| greater variance so you have fewer overall that will perform
| because there's more that are on the lower end and more that are
| on the higher end.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Anyone who has ever taught young boys and girls has almost
| certainly experienced a marked difference in behavior.
|
| Schooling as a whole needs to be overhauled to better accommodate
| young boys. Until then, we're going to see wider and wider gaps
| at highschool and university levels.
|
| Regardless of gender, schooling as a whole needs to move away
| from this factory-like system with underpaid teachers and an
| emphasis on test scores. It would be nice if there were an easy
| solution...
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